Rattlesnakes By Mail

Applebot vs Claude-SearchBot

Applebot and Claude-SearchBot compared on 11 documented fields, from 20 claims, last verified 2026-09-15.

Field	Applebot	Claude-SearchBot	Comparison
cites_sources	yes	not_documented	different
fallback_to_googlebot_rules	yes	not documented	different
honours_crawl_delay	no	yes	different
observed_paths_fetched	robots_txt_and_home_only	not documented	different
publishes_ip_list	yes	yes	same
purpose_documented	mixed	search	different
reads_llms_txt	not_documented	not_documented	same
respects_robots_txt	yes	yes	same
separate_search_and_training_tokens	partial	yes	different
user_agent_string_full	Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.4 Safari/605.1.15 (Applebot/0.1; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot)	not_documented	different
verifiable_by_rdns	yes	not_documented	different

Differences

Field	Applebot statement	Claude-SearchBot statement
cites_sources	Apple includes links to source websites in Siri and Search answers to broad world knowledge questions.	Anthropic does not publish whether Claude search responses cite pages crawled by Claude-SearchBot.
fallback_to_googlebot_rules	Applebot follows Googlebot robots.txt instructions when a robots.txt file mentions Googlebot but not Applebot.	not documented
honours_crawl_delay	Applebot does not follow the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive.	Claude-SearchBot respects the Crawl-delay directive in robots.txt when crawling domains.
observed_paths_fetched	Applebot made 6 requests to Rattlesnakes By Mail between 2026-09-13T20:00Z and 2026-09-15T09:00Z, to 2 distinct paths, /robots.txt and the home page. Applebot's 6 requests to Rattlesnakes By Mail run from 2026-09-14T12:22:23Z to 2026-09-14T12:59:26Z and alternate the two paths three times.	not documented
purpose_documented	Applebot crawls content for Apple search results and for training Apple foundation models.	Claude-SearchBot analyses online content to improve the relevance and accuracy of Claude search responses.
separate_search_and_training_tokens	Apple uses one crawler token, Applebot, for search crawling and for training crawling, and a second robots.txt token, Applebot-Extended, that opts content out of training use.	Anthropic separates search and training controls into two robots.txt tokens: Claude-SearchBot for search and ClaudeBot for training.
user_agent_string_full	Applebot sends the desktop user agent string Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.4 Safari/605.1.15 (Applebot/0.1; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot).	Anthropic does not publish a full user agent string for Claude-SearchBot.
verifiable_by_rdns	Applebot traffic is verifiable by reverse DNS lookup in the applebot.apple.com domain.	Anthropic does not publish a reverse-DNS verification method for Claude-SearchBot.

Sources