Rattlesnakes By Mail

Applebot vs Googlebot

Applebot and Googlebot compared on 12 documented fields, from 21 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 Googlebot, fields comparedApplebot and Googlebot, fields compared. Different is the largest with 7 fields, out of 12 fields in total.Same: 5 fieldsSame5Different: 7 fieldsDifferent7
Applebot and Googlebot, fields compared. Different is the largest with 7 fields, out of 12 fields in total. Source: each vendor's own crawler documentation, quoted and dated on every claim page.
FieldApplebotGooglebotComparison
cites_sourcesyesyessame
fallback_to_googlebot_rulesyesnot documenteddifferent
honours_crawl_delaynonosame
observed_paths_fetchedrobots_txt_and_home_onlynot documenteddifferent
observed_verified_request_ratio_censusnot documented0.991different
publishes_ip_listyesyessame
purpose_documentedmixedsearchdifferent
reads_llms_txtnot_documentednodifferent
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)Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)different
verifiable_by_rdnsyesyessame

Differences

FieldApplebot statementGooglebot statement
fallback_to_googlebot_rulesApplebot follows Googlebot robots.txt instructions when a robots.txt file mentions Googlebot but not Applebot.not documented
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
observed_verified_request_ratio_censusnot documentedGooglebot requests to Rattlesnakes By Mail matched Google's published IP ranges on 108 of 109 requests between 2026-09-13T20:00Z and 2026-09-15T09:00Z. Googlebot's first request to Rattlesnakes By Mail in that window was /robots.txt at 2026-09-14T11:53:00Z.
purpose_documentedApplebot crawls content for Apple search results and for training Apple foundation models.Googlebot crawls pages for Google Search, Google Images, Google Video, Google News, and Discover.
reads_llms_txtApple does not publish whether Applebot reads llms.txt files.Google Search does not use llms.txt files.
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.Google separates Search crawling under the Googlebot token from Gemini training under the Google-Extended 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).Googlebot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html).

Sources