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Apple App Site Association

The Apple App Site Association is used to support "Universal Links" that can open in native iOS apps.
AppleAASA-Bot
Social MediaPreview

What is Apple App Site Association?

Apple App Site Association is Apple's social media crawler. The Apple App Site Association is used to support "Universal Links" that can open in native iOS apps.

Apple App Site Association works across social platforms, where shared links and their preview metadata drive discovery. The same structured metadata it reads also helps AI systems understand your pages, so keeping it allowed supports both social reach and AI visibility.

Like any automated client, Apple App Site Association consumes crawl budget and appears in your server and CDN logs. Reviewing those logs alongside your robots.txt rules helps you keep automated traffic deliberate and easy to reason about.

Want to see every AI bot hitting your site? Promptwatch turns your server and CDN logs into a live view of AI crawler and agent traffic, so you can watch ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and others crawl your pages and connect those visits to real citations and revenue. Learn more in AI crawler logs.

See every AI bot hitting your site

Promptwatch turns your server and CDN logs into a live view of AI crawler and agent traffic. Watch ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and more crawl your pages in real time, see exactly what they take, and connect every crawl to the citations and revenue it drives.

How to handle Apple App Site Association

You will usually want Apple App Site Association allowed so your pages surface properly when people share them. Block it only if you do not want your content appearing on that platform.

To control Apple App Site Association, add a rule for its user agent to your robots.txt:

User-agent: AASA-Bot
Disallow: /

Apple does not publish a robots.txt commitment for Apple App Site Association, so confirm how it behaves by watching your access logs.

Examples

  • A social team shares a campaign landing page and checks that Apple App Site Association fetched the right image and title.
  • A marketer keeps Apple App Site Association allowed so posts linking to the site render with full preview metadata.

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Frequently asked questions about Apple App Site Association

Learn about AI visibility monitoring and how Promptwatch helps your brand succeed in AI search.

Apple App Site Association is operated by Apple. It functions as Apple's social media crawler.

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