Rattlesnakes By Mail

Applebot-Extended vs OAI-SearchBot

Applebot-Extended and OAI-SearchBot compared on 12 documented fields, from 18 claims, last verified 2026-09-15.

Field	Applebot-Extended	OAI-SearchBot	Comparison
cites_sources	not documented	yes	different
honours_crawl_delay	n/a	not_documented	different
observed_arrival_before_sitemap	not documented	yes	different
publishes_ip_list	no	yes	different
purpose_documented	policy_only	search	different
reads_llms_txt	not documented	not_documented	different
respects_robots_txt	n/a	yes	different
robots_token_differs_from_ua	yes	not documented	different
separate_search_and_training_tokens	yes	yes	same
user_agent_string_full	not documented	Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36; compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/searchbot	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-SearchBot statement
cites_sources	not documented	OAI-SearchBot surfaces crawled websites as links in ChatGPT search answers.
honours_crawl_delay	Apple does not publish a Crawl-delay behaviour for Applebot-Extended.	OpenAI does not publish whether OAI-SearchBot honours the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive.
observed_arrival_before_sitemap	not documented	OAI-SearchBot first requested Rattlesnakes By Mail at 2026-09-13T21:41:14Z, before the Rattlesnakes By Mail sitemap was submitted to Bing Webmaster Tools shortly before 2026-09-15T08:38Z and to Google Search Console at 2026-09-15T09:00Z. OAI-SearchBot made 3 requests to Rattlesnakes By Mail between 2026-09-13T20:00Z and 2026-09-15T09:00Z, all 3 to /robots.txt.
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-SearchBot as a JSON file at https://openai.com/searchbot.json.
purpose_documented	Applebot-Extended controls whether website content is used to train Apple general purpose foundation models.	OAI-SearchBot surfaces websites in search results in ChatGPT search features.
reads_llms_txt	not documented	OpenAI does not publish whether OAI-SearchBot reads llms.txt files.
respects_robots_txt	Applebot-Extended is a robots.txt token that publishers disallow to opt out of generative model training.	OAI-SearchBot honours robots.txt opt-outs set for the OAI-SearchBot token.
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
user_agent_string_full	not documented	OAI-SearchBot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36; compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/searchbot.
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-SearchBot.
what_it_controls	Applebot-Extended controls the AI training use of crawled content and does not control search indexing.	not documented

Sources