# 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

- https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots
- https://openai.com/searchbot.json
- https://rattlesnakesbymail.com/observed/applebot
- https://rattlesnakesbymail.com/observed/oai-searchbot
- https://search.developer.apple.com/applebot.json
- https://support.apple.com/en-us/119829