How this works
There are two names in Apple's documentation, and only one of them is a crawler:
- Applebot: the actual crawler. It reads your pages, and what it collects powers search in Siri, Spotlight and Safari. This is the one that decides whether Apple can find you.
- Applebot-Extended: not a crawler at all. Apple states that Applebot-Extended does not crawl webpages. It only controls whether content Applebot already collected may be used to train Apple's general-purpose AI models.
What this means in practice
Blocking Applebot-Extended does not hide you from Siri or Spotlight. Apple says pages that disallow it can still appear in search results, and that these rules aren't considered in ranking. It's a training opt-out, nothing more.
Blocking Applebot is the one that costs you. Do that and Apple has no copy of your pages to search at all.
So if your goal is "stay out of AI training but stay findable on iPhone", the answer is simple: block Applebot-Extended, allow Applebot. Those two decisions don't conflict.
Why it matters
Most "block AI bots" tools and checklists list Applebot-Extended alongside GPTBot and ClaudeBot, as though they did the same job. They don't. Site owners tick it expecting to disappear from Apple's AI, and nothing changes, while others block Applebot by mistake and quietly vanish from Siri and Spotlight.
How to fix
1. Check your robots.txt. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt in your browser. If you see this, Apple can't read your site:
User-agent: Applebot
Disallow: /Delete those lines. Nothing needs to go in their place. With no rule against it, the crawler is allowed.
2. Check bot protection on your CDN or hosting. If robots.txt is clean and Apple still can't get in, something is refusing the crawler at server level. On Cloudflare that's usually the Block AI Bots setting or a firewall rule.
3. To limit quoting without disappearing, Apple points to the nosnippet meta tag, which controls whether your content is used as context in broad answers from Siri and Search.
Where to change this on your platform
WordPress
robots.txt is normally managed by your SEO plugin: editing robots.txt in Yoast SEO.
Shopify
the file comes from a theme template: editing robots.txt.liquid.
Wix
there's a built-in editor: editing your site's robots.txt file.
Squarespace
you can't edit the file by hand. One checkbox writes it for you: Request that AI models exclude your site, under Settings → Crawlers. It blocks Applebot-Extended but not Applebot, so you opt out of training and stay in Siri and Spotlight.
If you can't find the setting
If robots.txt looks right and your security settings are off, ask your hosting provider whether they filter crawler traffic. That's the one place a site owner can't see from the outside.
