Rattlesnakes By Mail

Applebot vs ClaudeBot

Applebot and ClaudeBot compared on 16 documented fields, from 23 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 ClaudeBot, fields comparedApplebot and ClaudeBot, fields compared. Different is the largest with 14 fields, out of 16 fields in total.Same: 2 fieldsSame2Different: 14 fieldsDifferent14
Applebot and ClaudeBot, fields compared. Different is the largest with 14 fields, out of 16 fields in total. Source: each vendor's own crawler documentation, quoted and dated on every claim page.
FieldApplebotClaudeBotComparison
anti_circumvention_stancenot documenteddocumenteddifferent
cites_sourcesyesnot documenteddifferent
fallback_to_googlebot_rulesyesnot documenteddifferent
honours_crawl_delaynoyesdifferent
observed_fetches_jsonnot documentedyesdifferent
observed_fetches_markdownnot documentedyesdifferent
observed_first_request_pathnot documented/sitemap.xmldifferent
observed_format_pass_ordernot documentedhtml_json_mddifferent
observed_paths_fetchedrobots_txt_and_home_onlynot documenteddifferent
publishes_ip_listyesyessame
purpose_documentedmixedtrainingdifferent
reads_llms_txtnot_documentednot documenteddifferent
respects_robots_txtyesyessame
separate_search_and_training_tokenspartialyesdifferent
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)not_documenteddifferent
verifiable_by_rdnsyesnot_documenteddifferent

Differences

FieldApplebot statementClaudeBot statement
anti_circumvention_stancenot documentedClaudeBot respects anti-circumvention technologies and does not bypass CAPTCHAs on crawled sites.
cites_sourcesApple includes links to source websites in Siri and Search answers to broad world knowledge questions.not documented
fallback_to_googlebot_rulesApplebot follows Googlebot robots.txt instructions when a robots.txt file mentions Googlebot but not Applebot.not documented
honours_crawl_delayApplebot does not follow the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive.Anthropic supports the non-standard robots.txt Crawl-delay extension for ClaudeBot.
observed_fetches_jsonnot documentedClaudeBot made 177 JSON requests to Rattlesnakes By Mail between 2026-09-13T20:00Z and 2026-09-15T09:00Z, covering the .json twin of 170 base paths. The .json URLs of Rattlesnakes By Mail appear in no entry of the 171 URL sitemap.
observed_fetches_markdownnot documentedClaudeBot fetched the .md twin of 170 base paths on Rattlesnakes By Mail between 2026-09-13T20:00Z and 2026-09-15T09:00Z, 170 Markdown requests of 542 ClaudeBot requests in that window. The .md URLs of Rattlesnakes By Mail appear in no entry of the 171 URL sitemap.
observed_first_request_pathnot documentedClaudeBot's first request to Rattlesnakes By Mail between 2026-09-13T20:00Z and 2026-09-15T09:00Z was /sitemap.xml at 2026-09-14T19:53:45Z. ClaudeBot fetched /robots.txt on the second request to Rattlesnakes By Mail.
observed_format_pass_ordernot documentedClaudeBot fetched Rattlesnakes By Mail in three format passes between 2026-09-13T20:00Z and 2026-09-15T09:00Z, HTML from 2026-09-14T20:52Z to 2026-09-14T20:57Z, then JSON from 2026-09-14T21:37Z to 2026-09-14T21:56Z, then Markdown from 2026-09-14T21:37Z to 2026-09-14T21:57Z. The same order holds on 170 of 170 base paths that ClaudeBot fetched in all three formats on Rattlesnakes By Mail.
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
purpose_documentedApplebot crawls content for Apple search results and for training Apple foundation models.ClaudeBot collects web content for training Anthropic generative AI models.
reads_llms_txtApple does not publish whether Applebot reads llms.txt files.not documented
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.Anthropic separates training and search controls into two robots.txt tokens: ClaudeBot for training and Claude-SearchBot for search.
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).Anthropic does not publish a full user agent string for ClaudeBot.
verifiable_by_rdnsApplebot traffic is verifiable by reverse DNS lookup in the applebot.apple.com domain.Anthropic does not publish a reverse-DNS verification method for ClaudeBot.

Sources