Rattlesnakes By Mail

Applebot vs ClaudeBot

Applebot and ClaudeBot compared on 16 documented fields, from 23 claims, last verified 2026-09-15.

FieldApplebotClaudeBotComparison
anti_circumvention_stancenot documenteddocumenteddifferent
cites_sourcesyesnot documenteddifferent
fallback_to_googlebot_rulesyesnot documenteddifferent
honours_crawl_delaynoyesdifferent
observed_fetches_jsonnot documentedyesdifferent
observed_fetches_markdownnot documentedyesdifferent
observed_first_request_pathnot documented/sitemap.xmldifferent
observed_format_pass_ordernot documentedhtml_json_mddifferent
observed_paths_fetchedrobots_txt_and_home_onlynot documenteddifferent
publishes_ip_listyesyessame
purpose_documentedmixedtrainingdifferent
reads_llms_txtnot_documentednot documenteddifferent
respects_robots_txtyesyessame
separate_search_and_training_tokenspartialyesdifferent
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
verifiable_by_rdnsyesnot_documenteddifferent

Differences

FieldApplebot statementClaudeBot statement
anti_circumvention_stancenot documentedClaudeBot respects anti-circumvention technologies and does not bypass CAPTCHAs on crawled sites.
cites_sourcesApple includes links to source websites in Siri and Search answers to broad world knowledge questions.not documented
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.Anthropic supports the non-standard robots.txt Crawl-delay extension for ClaudeBot.
observed_fetches_jsonnot documentedClaudeBot made 177 JSON requests to Rattlesnakes By Mail between 2026-09-13T20:00Z and 2026-09-15T09:00Z, covering the .json twin of 170 base paths. The .json URLs of Rattlesnakes By Mail appear in no entry of the 171 URL sitemap.
observed_fetches_markdownnot documentedClaudeBot fetched the .md twin of 170 base paths on Rattlesnakes By Mail between 2026-09-13T20:00Z and 2026-09-15T09:00Z, 170 Markdown requests of 542 ClaudeBot requests in that window. The .md URLs of Rattlesnakes By Mail appear in no entry of the 171 URL sitemap.
observed_first_request_pathnot documentedClaudeBot's first request to Rattlesnakes By Mail between 2026-09-13T20:00Z and 2026-09-15T09:00Z was /sitemap.xml at 2026-09-14T19:53:45Z. ClaudeBot fetched /robots.txt on the second request to Rattlesnakes By Mail.
observed_format_pass_ordernot documentedClaudeBot fetched Rattlesnakes By Mail in three format passes between 2026-09-13T20:00Z and 2026-09-15T09:00Z, HTML from 2026-09-14T20:52Z to 2026-09-14T20:57Z, then JSON from 2026-09-14T21:37Z to 2026-09-14T21:56Z, then Markdown from 2026-09-14T21:37Z to 2026-09-14T21:57Z. The same order holds on 170 of 170 base paths that ClaudeBot fetched in all three formats on Rattlesnakes By Mail.
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.ClaudeBot collects web content for training Anthropic generative AI models.
reads_llms_txtApple does not publish whether Applebot reads llms.txt files.not documented
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 separates training and search controls into two robots.txt tokens: ClaudeBot for training and Claude-SearchBot for search.
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 ClaudeBot.
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 ClaudeBot.

Sources