What is Applebot-Extended?
Applebot-Extended is a robots.txt control token, not a crawler that makes its own page requests. Apple calls it a secondary user agent. Its only job is to tell Apple how content already fetched by Applebot may be used.
Applebot performs the actual crawl. When Apple processes a site's rules, an Applebot-Extended directive can prevent the resulting data from being used to train Apple's general-purpose foundation models. Apple's Applebot documentation is the source for this separation.
The training scope includes generative features across Apple products, including Apple Intelligence, Services, and Developer Tools. A disallow rule is therefore a specific training-data opt-out. It is not a request to remove the page from Apple's search systems.
Apple says pages covered by an Applebot-Extended disallow can still appear in search results. The rule does not block Applebot itself and does not remove eligibility for search experiences in Spotlight, Siri, or Safari. Publishers can make the training choice without giving up those search surfaces.
Because Applebot-Extended never crawls pages, it should not appear as a separate visitor in access logs. A log entry will normally identify Applebot, while the Extended decision comes from the site's robots file. There is no independent Applebot-Extended request to authenticate or rate-limit.
Applebot-Extended is recorded as following robots.txt and has a stable token. Rules can cover the whole site or selected public paths. Allowing the token permits the documented training use, but it does not guarantee that any model will learn a particular fact or mention the site in generated output.
