Rattlesnakes By Mail

Applebot vs PerplexityBot

Applebot and PerplexityBot compared on 11 documented fields, from 20 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 PerplexityBot, fields comparedApplebot and PerplexityBot, fields compared. Different is the largest with 7 fields, out of 11 fields in total.Same: 4 fieldsSame4Different: 7 fieldsDifferent7
Applebot and PerplexityBot, fields compared. Different is the largest with 7 fields, out of 11 fields in total. Source: each vendor's own crawler documentation, quoted and dated on every claim page.
FieldApplebotPerplexityBotComparison
cites_sourcesyesyessame
fallback_to_googlebot_rulesyesnot documenteddifferent
honours_crawl_delaynonot_documenteddifferent
observed_paths_fetchedrobots_txt_and_home_onlynot documenteddifferent
publishes_ip_listyesyessame
purpose_documentedmixedsearchdifferent
reads_llms_txtnot_documentednot_documentedsame
respects_robots_txtyesyessame
separate_search_and_training_tokenspartialnot_documenteddifferent
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; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)different
verifiable_by_rdnsyesnot_documenteddifferent

Differences

FieldApplebot statementPerplexityBot statement
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.Perplexity does not publish whether PerplexityBot 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.PerplexityBot surfaces and links websites in Perplexity search results.
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.Perplexity does not document a separate training crawler token alongside PerplexityBot.
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).PerplexityBot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot).
verifiable_by_rdnsApplebot traffic is verifiable by reverse DNS lookup in the applebot.apple.com domain.Perplexity does not publish a reverse-DNS verification method for PerplexityBot.

Sources