Rattlesnakes By Mail

Applebot vs Perplexity-User

Applebot and Perplexity-User compared on 11 documented fields, from 20 claims, last verified 2026-09-15.

Field	Applebot	Perplexity-User	Comparison
cites_sources	yes	yes	same
fallback_to_googlebot_rules	yes	not documented	different
honours_crawl_delay	no	not_documented	different
observed_paths_fetched	robots_txt_and_home_only	not documented	different
publishes_ip_list	yes	yes	same
purpose_documented	mixed	user_fetch	different
reads_llms_txt	not_documented	not_documented	same
respects_robots_txt	yes	no	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)	Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)	different
verifiable_by_rdns	yes	not_documented	different

Differences

Field	Applebot statement	Perplexity-User 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.	Perplexity does not publish whether Perplexity-User honours the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive.
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.	Perplexity-User visits web pages to answer questions that users ask Perplexity.
respects_robots_txt	Applebot respects standard robots.txt directives targeted at Applebot in general search crawls.	Perplexity-User ignores robots.txt rules because a user requests each Perplexity-User fetch.
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.	Perplexity does not document Perplexity-User as a search or training opt-out 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).	Perplexity-User sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user).
verifiable_by_rdns	Applebot traffic is verifiable by reverse DNS lookup in the applebot.apple.com domain.	Perplexity does not publish a reverse-DNS verification method for Perplexity-User.

Sources