# Applebot vs GoogleOther

Applebot and GoogleOther compared on 14 documented fields, from 20 claims, last verified 2026-09-15.

| Field | Applebot | GoogleOther | Comparison |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| cites_sources | yes | not documented | different |
| fallback_to_googlebot_rules | yes | not documented | different |
| honours_crawl_delay | no | no | same |
| observed_fetches_robots_txt | not documented | no | different |
| observed_paths_fetched | robots_txt_and_home_only | not documented | different |
| observed_requested_mcp_endpoint | not documented | yes | different |
| publishes_ip_list | yes | yes | same |
| purpose_documented | mixed | mixed | same |
| reads_llms_txt | not_documented | not documented | different |
| respects_robots_txt | yes | yes | same |
| robots_txt_token | not documented | GoogleOther | different |
| 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 |
| verifiable_by_rdns | yes | yes | same |

## Differences

| Field | Applebot statement | GoogleOther statement |
| --- | --- | --- |
| cites_sources | Apple includes links to source websites in Siri and Search answers to broad world knowledge questions. | not documented |
| fallback_to_googlebot_rules | Applebot follows Googlebot robots.txt instructions when a robots.txt file mentions Googlebot but not Applebot. | not documented |
| observed_fetches_robots_txt | not documented | GoogleOther made 93 requests to Rattlesnakes By Mail between 2026-09-13T20:00Z and 2026-09-15T09:00Z and fetched /robots.txt on none of those requests. GoogleOther's first request to Rattlesnakes By Mail was the home page at 2026-09-14T12:03:30Z. |
| 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_requested_mcp_endpoint | not documented | GoogleOther requested the /mcp endpoint of Rattlesnakes By Mail twice between 2026-09-13T20:00Z and 2026-09-15T09:00Z, at 2026-09-14T15:07:30Z and at 2026-09-14T18:27:49Z. Rattlesnakes By Mail returned status 405 to both GoogleOther requests for /mcp. |
| reads_llms_txt | Apple does not publish whether Applebot reads llms.txt files. | not documented |
| robots_txt_token | not documented | The robots.txt token for GoogleOther is GoogleOther. |
| 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 does not document whether content fetched by GoogleOther is used for Gemini 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). | not documented |

## Sources

- https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/verifying-googlebot
- https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/07/a-note-on-unsupported-rules-in-robotstxt
- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/google-common-crawlers
- https://developers.google.com/static/crawling/ipranges/common-crawlers.json
- https://rattlesnakesbymail.com/observed/applebot
- https://rattlesnakesbymail.com/observed/googleother
- https://search.developer.apple.com/applebot.json
- https://support.apple.com/en-us/119829