Rattlesnakes By Mail

Applebot vs GPTBot

Applebot and GPTBot compared on 12 documented fields, from 19 claims, last verified 2026-09-15.

FieldApplebotGPTBotComparison
cites_sourcesyesnot documenteddifferent
fallback_to_googlebot_rulesyesnot documenteddifferent
honours_crawl_delaynonot_documenteddifferent
observed_paths_fetchedrobots_txt_and_home_onlynot documenteddifferent
publishes_ip_listyesyessame
purpose_documentedmixedtrainingdifferent
reads_llms_txtnot_documentednot documenteddifferent
respects_robots_txtyesyessame
robots_txt_fetch_markernot documentedyesdifferent
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)Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; GPTBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/gptbotdifferent
verifiable_by_rdnsyesnot_documenteddifferent

Differences

FieldApplebot statementGPTBot statement
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.OpenAI does not publish whether GPTBot honours the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive.
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.GPTBot crawls content that may be used to train OpenAI generative AI foundation models.
reads_llms_txtApple does not publish whether Applebot reads llms.txt files.not documented
robots_txt_fetch_markernot documentedOpenAI may add a robots.txt marker to the GPTBot user agent string when GPTBot fetches robots.txt files.
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.OpenAI separates search and training controls into two robots.txt tokens: OAI-SearchBot for search and GPTBot for training.
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).GPTBot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; GPTBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/gptbot.
verifiable_by_rdnsApplebot traffic is verifiable by reverse DNS lookup in the applebot.apple.com domain.OpenAI does not publish a reverse-DNS verification method for GPTBot.

Sources