Rattlesnakes By Mail

Applebot vs Googlebot

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

Field	Applebot	Googlebot	Comparison
cites_sources	yes	yes	same
fallback_to_googlebot_rules	yes	not documented	different
honours_crawl_delay	no	no	same
observed_paths_fetched	robots_txt_and_home_only	not documented	different
observed_verified_request_ratio_census	not documented	0.991	different
publishes_ip_list	yes	yes	same
purpose_documented	mixed	search	different
reads_llms_txt	not_documented	no	different
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)	Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)	different
verifiable_by_rdns	yes	yes	same

Differences

Field	Applebot statement	Googlebot statement
fallback_to_googlebot_rules	Applebot follows Googlebot robots.txt instructions when a robots.txt file mentions Googlebot but not Applebot.	not documented
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
observed_verified_request_ratio_census	not documented	Googlebot requests to Rattlesnakes By Mail matched Google's published IP ranges on 108 of 109 requests between 2026-09-13T20:00Z and 2026-09-15T09:00Z. Googlebot's first request to Rattlesnakes By Mail in that window was /robots.txt at 2026-09-14T11:53:00Z.
purpose_documented	Applebot crawls content for Apple search results and for training Apple foundation models.	Googlebot crawls pages for Google Search, Google Images, Google Video, Google News, and Discover.
reads_llms_txt	Apple does not publish whether Applebot reads llms.txt files.	Google Search does not use llms.txt files.
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.	Google separates Search crawling under the Googlebot token from Gemini training under the Google-Extended 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).	Googlebot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html).

Sources