Rattlesnakes By Mail

Applebot vs GPTBot

Applebot and GPTBot compared on 12 documented fields, from 19 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 GPTBot, fields comparedApplebot and GPTBot, fields compared. Different is the largest with 10 fields, out of 12 fields in total.Same: 2 fieldsSame2Different: 10 fieldsDifferent10
Applebot and GPTBot, fields compared. Different is the largest with 10 fields, out of 12 fields in total. Source: each vendor's own crawler documentation, quoted and dated on every claim page.
FieldApplebotGPTBotComparison
cites_sourcesyesnot documenteddifferent
fallback_to_googlebot_rulesyesnot documenteddifferent
honours_crawl_delaynonot_documenteddifferent
observed_paths_fetchedrobots_txt_and_home_onlynot documenteddifferent
publishes_ip_listyesyessame
purpose_documentedmixedtrainingdifferent
reads_llms_txtnot_documentednot documenteddifferent
respects_robots_txtyesyessame
robots_txt_fetch_markernot documentedyesdifferent
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; GPTBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/gptbotdifferent
verifiable_by_rdnsyesnot_documenteddifferent

Differences

FieldApplebot statementGPTBot statement
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.OpenAI does not publish whether GPTBot honours the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive.
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.GPTBot crawls content that may be used to train OpenAI generative AI foundation models.
reads_llms_txtApple does not publish whether Applebot reads llms.txt files.not documented
robots_txt_fetch_markernot documentedOpenAI may add a robots.txt marker to the GPTBot user agent string when GPTBot fetches robots.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.OpenAI separates search and training controls into two robots.txt tokens: OAI-SearchBot for search and GPTBot for training.
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).GPTBot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; GPTBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/gptbot.
verifiable_by_rdnsApplebot traffic is verifiable by reverse DNS lookup in the applebot.apple.com domain.OpenAI does not publish a reverse-DNS verification method for GPTBot.

Sources