Apple added one sentence to its Applebot support page over the weekend: site rules for Applebot-Extended are not considered in ranking for Search. The edit settles a question site owners have carried since Apple split its crawler into two directives last year, and it lands just ahead of the public rollout of iOS 27.
The stakes are practical. Any publisher that has disallowed Applebot-Extended, whether to keep content out of Apple Intelligence and Siri’s generative features or as a blanket AI-crawler policy, now has it in writing that the choice will not cost them a position in Apple’s Search results. Before this update, that separation was implied by the crawler’s naming convention but never stated in Apple’s own documentation.
Applebot-Extended is the crawler Apple uses to gather training and grounding data for Apple Intelligence and Siri, distinct from the original Applebot that indexes pages for Search and Spotlight. Apple introduced the extended crawler in 2025, giving site owners a separate robots.txt directive to opt out of AI use without affecting their indexing. What was missing until this weekend’s edit was an explicit ranking guarantee.
The move mirrors how Google handles the same split. Google has stated that disallowing Googlebot-Extended, the crawler behind Gemini and AI Overviews training, does not affect a site’s presence in Google Search. Apple’s new line puts its own crawler policy on the same explicit footing, closing a gap between the two dominant search ecosystems’ documentation.
Barry Schwartz, writing for Search Engine Roundtable, reported the change and published a diff of the support page showing the added line alongside a routine date-stamp update. Schwartz linked the timing to iOS 27’s upcoming public release, which expands Siri’s Apple Intelligence features and, by extension, raises the odds that more site owners will actively manage Applebot-Extended access for the first time.
The unanswered question: Apple’s note addresses ranking, not visibility inside Siri or Apple Intelligence answers themselves. Blocking Applebot-Extended keeps a site out of Apple’s generative training and retrieval pipeline, which is a separate risk from ranking. A site can protect its Search position by disallowing the crawler and still lose the chance to be cited or referenced inside Apple’s AI answers, and Apple’s documentation does not quantify how much traffic or visibility that tradeoff represents.
For search teams building a crawler-access policy, this changes the calculus in one specific way: the decision to block Applebot-Extended no longer needs to weigh ranking risk against AI-training exposure. It only requires weighing AI-visibility tradeoffs, the same framework already used for Googlebot-Extended.
Search Engine Roundtable’s report did not include any independent measurement of how many sites currently block Applebot-Extended or how that share compares to Googlebot-Extended blocking rates, so the practical scale of the policy shift remains unmeasured.
Sites currently blocking or considering blocking Applebot-Extended should treat that setting as an AI-training and AI-visibility decision only, not a ranking one, and should re-audit their robots.txt directives for both Apple and Google’s extended crawlers before iOS 27 reaches general availability in the coming weeks.
Search Engine Roundtable reported the documentation change on September 7, 2026.
