Rattlesnakes By Mail

Applebot vs OAI-SearchBot

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

Field	Applebot	OAI-SearchBot	Comparison
cites_sources	yes	yes	same
fallback_to_googlebot_rules	yes	not documented	different
honours_crawl_delay	no	not_documented	different
observed_arrival_before_sitemap	not documented	yes	different
observed_paths_fetched	robots_txt_and_home_only	not documented	different
publishes_ip_list	yes	yes	same
purpose_documented	mixed	search	different
reads_llms_txt	not_documented	not_documented	same
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 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36; compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/searchbot	different
verifiable_by_rdns	yes	not_documented	different

Differences

Field	Applebot statement	OAI-SearchBot statement
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.	OpenAI does not publish whether OAI-SearchBot honours the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive.
observed_arrival_before_sitemap	not documented	OAI-SearchBot first requested Rattlesnakes By Mail at 2026-09-13T21:41:14Z, before the Rattlesnakes By Mail sitemap was submitted to Bing Webmaster Tools shortly before 2026-09-15T08:38Z and to Google Search Console at 2026-09-15T09:00Z. OAI-SearchBot made 3 requests to Rattlesnakes By Mail between 2026-09-13T20:00Z and 2026-09-15T09:00Z, all 3 to /robots.txt.
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.	OAI-SearchBot surfaces websites in search results in ChatGPT search features.
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.	OpenAI separates search and training controls into two robots.txt tokens: OAI-SearchBot for search and GPTBot for 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).	OAI-SearchBot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36; compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/searchbot.
verifiable_by_rdns	Applebot traffic is verifiable by reverse DNS lookup in the applebot.apple.com domain.	OpenAI does not publish a reverse-DNS verification method for OAI-SearchBot.

Sources