How to Block the Apple Intelligence Bot (Applebot-Extended) on Your Website

Apple has two crawlers, and most website owners only know about one. Ordinary Applebot powers Siri and Spotlight suggestions — the kind of visibility you probably want. Applebot-Extended is different: it is the one that gathers your pages for training Apple's AI models. That is why so many people are now searching how to block the Apple Intelligence bot.

Blocking one does not block the other

This is the important part. You can turn away Applebot-Extended and keep ordinary Applebot, which means you opt out of AI training without giving up search traffic. Get the names wrong, though, and you can accidentally remove yourself from Apple's search results entirely.

It is not only Apple

Applebot-Extended is one name on a list that keeps growing: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Bytespider, CCBot, Google-Extended and more. A block you write by hand today is out of date the next time an AI company launches a new crawler — which now happens every few weeks.

The straightforward way to do it

Shieldify keeps the full crawler list current every day and gives you the exact rules file, page tags and shield line for WordPress, Shopify, Wix or Squarespace. Installing it yourself takes roughly 15 minutes, and search crawlers you want to keep are left alone.