Apple has finally published confirmation that AppleBot exists. It’s Apple’s web crawler, and is used for things like Spotlight Suggestions and Siri. The confirmation came via the help document and gave details about its operation.
The existence of the web crawling service was first noticed in November of 2014 and before now, most people thought that Apple performed queries through Bing or Google. The web crawler works pretty much the same as Googlebot. No one outside of Apple is sure how long AppleBot has been in operation; the support document showed up in February but it was empty of content until April.
