Rattlesnakes By Mail

Applebot-Extended vs PerplexityBot

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

FieldApplebot-ExtendedPerplexityBotComparison
cites_sourcesnot documentedyesdifferent
honours_crawl_delayn/anot_documenteddifferent
publishes_ip_listnoyesdifferent
purpose_documentedpolicy_onlysearchdifferent
reads_llms_txtnot documentednot_documenteddifferent
respects_robots_txtn/ayesdifferent
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; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)different
verifiable_by_rdnsn/anot_documenteddifferent
what_it_controlsAI training use of content, not search indexingnot documenteddifferent

Differences

FieldApplebot-Extended statementPerplexityBot statement
cites_sourcesnot documentedPerplexity links to the websites that PerplexityBot surfaces in Perplexity search results.
honours_crawl_delayApple does not publish a Crawl-delay behaviour for Applebot-Extended.Perplexity does not publish whether PerplexityBot 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 PerplexityBot as a JSON file at https://www.perplexity.ai/perplexitybot.json.
purpose_documentedApplebot-Extended controls whether website content is used to train Apple general purpose foundation models.PerplexityBot surfaces and links websites in Perplexity search results.
reads_llms_txtnot documentedPerplexity does not publish whether PerplexityBot reads llms.txt files.
respects_robots_txtApplebot-Extended is a robots.txt token that publishers disallow to opt out of generative model training.PerplexityBot honours robots.txt rules that webmasters set for the PerplexityBot token.
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 a separate training crawler token alongside PerplexityBot.
user_agent_string_fullnot documentedPerplexityBot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot).
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 PerplexityBot.
what_it_controlsApplebot-Extended controls the AI training use of crawled content and does not control search indexing.not documented

Sources