Rattlesnakes By Mail

Applebot-Extended vs Perplexity-User

Applebot-Extended and Perplexity-User compared on 11 documented fields, from 17 claims, last verified 2026-09-13.

FieldApplebot-ExtendedPerplexity-UserComparison
cites_sourcesnot documentedyesdifferent
honours_crawl_delayn/anot_documenteddifferent
publishes_ip_listnoyesdifferent
purpose_documentedpolicy_onlyuser_fetchdifferent
reads_llms_txtnot documentednot_documenteddifferent
respects_robots_txtn/anodifferent
robots_token_differs_from_uayesnot documenteddifferent
separate_search_and_training_tokensyesnot_documenteddifferent
user_agent_string_fullnot documentedMozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)different
verifiable_by_rdnsn/anot_documenteddifferent
what_it_controlsAI training use of content, not search indexingnot documenteddifferent

Differences

FieldApplebot-Extended statementPerplexity-User statement
cites_sourcesnot documentedPerplexity includes a link to each page that Perplexity-User visits in the Perplexity response.
honours_crawl_delayApple does not publish a Crawl-delay behaviour for Applebot-Extended.Perplexity does not publish whether Perplexity-User honours the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive.
publishes_ip_listApple publishes no IP list specific to Applebot-Extended and documents one shared crawl identity for Applebot.Perplexity publishes the IP address ranges used by Perplexity-User as a JSON file at https://www.perplexity.ai/perplexity-user.json.
purpose_documentedApplebot-Extended controls whether website content is used to train Apple general purpose foundation models.Perplexity-User visits web pages to answer questions that users ask Perplexity.
reads_llms_txtnot documentedPerplexity does not publish whether Perplexity-User reads llms.txt files.
respects_robots_txtApplebot-Extended is a robots.txt token that publishers disallow to opt out of generative model training.Perplexity-User ignores robots.txt rules because a user requests each Perplexity-User fetch.
robots_token_differs_from_uaApplebot-Extended is a robots.txt control token and does not correspond to a separate crawler user agent string.not documented
separate_search_and_training_tokensWebpages that disallow Applebot-Extended remain eligible for inclusion in Apple search results.Perplexity does not document Perplexity-User as a search or training opt-out token.
user_agent_string_fullnot documentedPerplexity-User sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user).
verifiable_by_rdnsApple does not publish a reverse-DNS verification method specific to Applebot-Extended.Perplexity does not publish a reverse-DNS verification method for Perplexity-User.
what_it_controlsApplebot-Extended controls the AI training use of crawled content and does not control search indexing.not documented

Sources