# 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

- https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots
- https://openai.com/searchbot.json
- https://rattlesnakesbymail.com/observed/oai-searchbot
- https://support.apple.com/en-us/119829