# Applebot vs Claude-User

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

| Field | Applebot | Claude-User | 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 | user_fetch | different |
| reads_llms_txt | not_documented | not_documented | same |
| respects_robots_txt | yes | yes | same |
| separate_search_and_training_tokens | partial | not_documented | 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 |
| user_fetch_exception_documented | not documented | no | different |
| verifiable_by_rdns | yes | not_documented | different |

## Differences

| Field | Applebot statement | Claude-User 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 responses cite pages fetched by Claude-User. |
| 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-User respects the Crawl-delay directive in robots.txt when fetching pages. |
| 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-User accesses websites in response to questions that individual users ask Claude. |
| 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 does not document Claude-User as a search or training opt-out token. |
| 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-User. |
| user_fetch_exception_documented | not documented | Anthropic 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_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-User. |

## Sources

- https://claude.com/crawling/bots.json
- https://rattlesnakesbymail.com/observed/applebot
- https://search.developer.apple.com/applebot.json
- https://support.apple.com/en-us/119829
- https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthropic-crawl-content-from-the-web-and-how-can-site-owners-block-the-crawler