Rattlesnakes By Mail

Applebot-Extended vs OAI-AdsBot

Applebot-Extended and OAI-AdsBot compared on 10 documented fields, from 16 claims, last verified 2026-09-13.

Field	Applebot-Extended	OAI-AdsBot	Comparison
honours_crawl_delay	n/a	not_documented	different
publishes_ip_list	no	yes	different
purpose_documented	policy_only	ads	different
respects_robots_txt	n/a	not_documented	different
robots_token_differs_from_ua	yes	not documented	different
scope_of_crawling	not documented	limited to submitted ad landing pages	different
separate_search_and_training_tokens	yes	not_documented	different
user_agent_string_full	not documented	Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-AdsBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/adsbot	different
verifiable_by_rdns	n/a	not_documented	different
what_it_controls	AI training use of content, not search indexing	not documented	different

Differences

Field	Applebot-Extended statement	OAI-AdsBot statement
honours_crawl_delay	Apple does not publish a Crawl-delay behaviour for Applebot-Extended.	OpenAI does not publish whether OAI-AdsBot honours the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive.
publishes_ip_list	Apple publishes no IP list specific to Applebot-Extended and documents one shared crawl identity for Applebot.	OpenAI publishes the IP address ranges used by OAI-AdsBot as a JSON file at https://openai.com/adsbot.json.
purpose_documented	Applebot-Extended controls whether website content is used to train Apple general purpose foundation models.	OAI-AdsBot visits landing pages submitted as ads on ChatGPT to check compliance with OpenAI policies.
respects_robots_txt	Applebot-Extended is a robots.txt token that publishers disallow to opt out of generative model training.	OpenAI does not publish whether OAI-AdsBot honours robots.txt disallow rules.
robots_token_differs_from_ua	Applebot-Extended is a robots.txt control token and does not correspond to a separate crawler user agent string.	not documented
scope_of_crawling	not documented	OAI-AdsBot visits only pages submitted as ads on ChatGPT.
separate_search_and_training_tokens	Webpages that disallow Applebot-Extended remain eligible for inclusion in Apple search results.	OpenAI does not document OAI-AdsBot as part of a search and training token split.
user_agent_string_full	not documented	OAI-AdsBot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-AdsBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/adsbot.
verifiable_by_rdns	Apple does not publish a reverse-DNS verification method specific to Applebot-Extended.	OpenAI does not publish a reverse-DNS verification method for OAI-AdsBot.
what_it_controls	Applebot-Extended controls the AI training use of crawled content and does not control search indexing.	not documented

Sources