Apple expanded the address space for Applebot, the crawler that feeds Siri and Apple Intelligence, adding 18 new /24 CIDR blocks plus 3 /28 blocks. Together those ranges total 4,656 new IP addresses in a single pass. Search consultant Ryan Siddle flagged the expansion on LinkedIn, noting that Apple’s published range had gone unrevised for years before this change.
Siddle compared the jump to how OpenAI has periodically widened its own crawler IPs to warm servers ahead of a release, pointing to the recent Sol 5.6 rollout as an example, though he said Apple’s expansion was larger in scale. He offered his own reading that the move could hint at a new push into AI search, a forward looking interpretation rather than anything Apple has confirmed.
Apple last revised its Applebot documentation in June, adding detail on AI, Siri, and Apple Intelligence.
Anyone allowlisting or rate limiting crawlers by IP is now working from a stale list, and a bot suddenly claiming thousands of new addresses is worth logging before it shows up as unexplained load.
Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz reported the update on August 17, 2026, citing Ryan Siddle’s LinkedIn post.
