在 Hacker News Daily 上翻到的：「About Applebot」，另外 Hacker News 上的討論也蠻有趣的，可以看看：「Applebot (support.apple.com)」。
目前的用途是用在 Siri 之類的 bot：
Applebot is the web crawler for Apple. Products like Siri and Spotlight Suggestions use Applebot.
裡面有提到辨識方式，IP 會使用 17.0.0.0/8，反解會是 *.applebot.apple.com：
Traffic coming from Applebot is identified by its user agent, and reverse DNS shows it in the *.applebot.apple.com domain, originating from the 17.0.0.0 net block.
另外 User-agent 也可以看出：
Mozilla/5.0 (Device; OS_version) AppleWebKit/WebKit_version (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/Safari_version Safari/WebKit_version (Applebot/Applebot_version)
後面有提到 search engine 的部份 (About search rankings)，這點讓大家在猜蘋果是不是開始在弄 search engine 了，在 Hacker News 上的討論串裡面可以看到不少對於蘋果自己搞 search engine 的猜測。
然後也有些頗有趣的，像是爆料當初開發的過程遇到的問題 XD
jd20 3 days ago [–]
Some fun facts:
- Applebot was originally written in Go (and uncovered a user agent bug on redirects, revealing it's Go origins to the world, which Russ Cox fixed the next day).- Up until the release of iOS 9, Applebot ran entirely on four Mac Pro's in an office. Those four Mac Pro's could crawl close to 1B web pages a day.
- In it's first week of existence, it nearly took Apple's internal DNS servers offline. It was then modified to do it's own DNS resolution and caching, fond memories...
Source: I worked on the original version.