Well, this is interesting:
Applebot is the web crawler for Apple, used by products including Siri and Spotlight Suggestions. It respects customary robots.txt rules and robots meta tags. It originates in the 17.0.0.0 net block.
User-agent strings will contain “Applebot” together with additional agent information. For example:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10101) AppleWebKit/600.2.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0.2 Safari/600.2.5 (Applebot/0.1)
If robots instructions don’t mention Applebot but do mention Googlebot, the Apple robot will follow Googlebot instructions.
“Will Apple get into search?” has been a question asked by company watchers for years. Now, it seems, the answer is yes, at least in some capacity. While the company is calling Applebot a “Web crawler” for Siri and Spotlight, it’s not hard to see this being part of a much bigger project.
(In fact, this has been going on for some time, which shouldn’t be suprising.)
My assumption is that Applebot will start as a new options — probably the default — for Siri and Spotlights results maybe as early as iOS 9 and Mac OS X 10.11.[1]
I don’t see Apple banishing Bing from these system-level utilities on the first go-round, though. If the fallout from Maps was bad, I can’t imagine how poorly bad or incomplete search results would be received.
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Safari, of course, allows users to select from Google, Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. My guess is that Applebot will show up here as well, but maybe not as quickly as in Spotlight and Siri. ↩