Rattlesnakes By Mail

Applebot vs Claude-User

Applebot and Claude-User compared on 12 documented fields, from 21 claims, last verified 2026-09-15.

FieldApplebotClaude-UserComparison
cites_sourcesyesnot_documenteddifferent
fallback_to_googlebot_rulesyesnot documenteddifferent
honours_crawl_delaynoyesdifferent
observed_paths_fetchedrobots_txt_and_home_onlynot documenteddifferent
publishes_ip_listyesyessame
purpose_documentedmixeduser_fetchdifferent
reads_llms_txtnot_documentednot_documentedsame
respects_robots_txtyesyessame
separate_search_and_training_tokenspartialnot_documenteddifferent
user_agent_string_fullMozilla/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_documenteddifferent
user_fetch_exception_documentednot documentednodifferent
verifiable_by_rdnsyesnot_documenteddifferent

Differences

FieldApplebot statementClaude-User statement
cites_sourcesApple includes links to source websites in Siri and Search answers to broad world knowledge questions.Anthropic does not publish whether Claude responses cite pages fetched by Claude-User.
fallback_to_googlebot_rulesApplebot follows Googlebot robots.txt instructions when a robots.txt file mentions Googlebot but not Applebot.not documented
honours_crawl_delayApplebot does not follow the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive.Claude-User respects the Crawl-delay directive in robots.txt when fetching pages.
observed_paths_fetchedApplebot 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_documentedApplebot crawls content for Apple search results and for training Apple foundation models.Claude-User accesses websites in response to questions that individual users ask Claude.
separate_search_and_training_tokensApple 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 does not document Claude-User as a search or training opt-out token.
user_agent_string_fullApplebot 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-User.
user_fetch_exception_documentednot documentedAnthropic applies the same robots.txt statement to Claude-User as to ClaudeBot and Claude-SearchBot and documents no exception for user-initiated fetches.
verifiable_by_rdnsApplebot traffic is verifiable by reverse DNS lookup in the applebot.apple.com domain.Anthropic does not publish a reverse-DNS verification method for Claude-User.

Sources