Rattlesnakes By Mail

Applebot vs Bingbot

Applebot and Bingbot compared on 13 documented fields, from 22 claims, last verified 2026-09-15.

How many of the compared fields have the same answer for both crawlers, and how many differ.

Applebot and Bingbot, fields comparedApplebot and Bingbot, fields compared. Different is the largest with 8 fields, out of 13 fields in total.Same: 5 fieldsSame5Different: 8 fieldsDifferent8
Applebot and Bingbot, fields compared. Different is the largest with 8 fields, out of 13 fields in total. Source: each vendor's own crawler documentation, quoted and dated on every claim page.
FieldApplebotBingbotComparison
cites_sourcesyesyessame
fallback_to_googlebot_rulesyesnot documenteddifferent
follows_noarchivenot documentedyesdifferent
honours_crawl_delaynoyesdifferent
observed_paths_fetchedrobots_txt_and_home_onlynot documenteddifferent
opt_out_mechanismnot documentedyesdifferent
publishes_ip_listyesyessame
purpose_documentedmixedyesdifferent
reads_llms_txtnot_documentednot_documentedsame
respects_robots_txtyesyessame
separate_search_and_training_tokenspartialnodifferent
user_agent_string_fullMozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.4 Safari/605.1.15 (Applebot/0.1; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot)Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)different
verifiable_by_rdnsyesyessame

Differences

FieldApplebot statementBingbot statement
fallback_to_googlebot_rulesApplebot follows Googlebot robots.txt instructions when a robots.txt file mentions Googlebot but not Applebot.not documented
follows_noarchivenot documentedBingbot excludes noarchive-tagged content from Copilot and Chat answers and from generative AI training data.
honours_crawl_delayApplebot does not follow the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive.Microsoft states that a crawl-delay directive in robots.txt always takes precedence over Bing Webmaster Tools crawl control settings for Bingbot.
observed_paths_fetchedApplebot made 6 requests to Rattlesnakes By Mail between 2026-09-13T20:00Z and 2026-09-15T09:00Z, to 2 distinct paths, /robots.txt and the home page. Applebot's 6 requests to Rattlesnakes By Mail run from 2026-09-14T12:22:23Z to 2026-09-14T12:59:26Z and alternate the two paths three times.not documented
opt_out_mechanismnot documentedMicrosoft lets publishers block Bingbot content from Copilot answers and AI training using noarchive and nocache tags.
purpose_documentedApplebot crawls content for Apple search results and for training Apple foundation models.Bingbot serves as Microsoft's standard crawler and handles most of Bing's daily web crawling.
separate_search_and_training_tokensApple uses one crawler token, Applebot, for search crawling and for training crawling, and a second robots.txt token, Applebot-Extended, that opts content out of training use.Microsoft controls Bingbot's use in AI training through meta tags rather than publishing a separate training-specific crawler token.
user_agent_string_fullApplebot sends the desktop user agent string Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.4 Safari/605.1.15 (Applebot/0.1; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot).Bingbot sends a user agent string containing bingbot/2.0 and a link to Microsoft's bingbot.htm page.

Sources