I've noticed a huge increase in Apple Bot activity on my niche e-commerce site in the last few weeks. It's now crawling my pages up to three times more than Google Bot, hitting over 5,000 product pages daily. The strange part is that I'm not seeing any referral traffic from Apple, unlike Google. It seems like they might be gathering data for their upcoming AI or language model this fall. Has anyone else experienced this? Should I just let them keep crawling, hoping it leads to future sales?
5 Answers
I'm also seeing a sudden rise in Apple Bot activity on my site. It's frustrating because there's zero referral traffic. It feels like we're just feeding them data with no payback!
I don’t let Apple crawl my sites anymore. They're probably scraping for their AI without offering any return in traffic. It’s better to block them entirely since they’re not giving any value—just training data. You might also want to consider feeding them dummy links filled with poor data to deter them further.
That’s an interesting strategy! I’ve heard about new tools to manage crawlers. Might be worth exploring.
We’ve had the same spike in crawling on multiple e-commerce sites. Notably, Apple uses two different crawlers—one for Siri and another for AI training. Check your logs to see which one is active. If it's the AI one, you can specifically block it without losing Siri visibility. Before blocking, verify if you're getting any traffic from Apple suggestions, as that might not show in your main analytics.
I've seen the same pattern! It feels like many of these crawlers are more focused on collecting data rather than actually offering search value. The lack of referrals is frustrating since you're essentially absorbing the infrastructure costs without seeing any gain. Some folks are choosing to rate-limit or selectively block these crawlers, but it’s a bit of a gamble if they'll become valuable traffic sources in the future.
I’ve noticed similar trends with various AI crawlers as well. Apple Bot has been quite active lately, crawling 2-3 times more than before. I think this spike is related to their increased focus on AI features. They need current data for things like visual search and product recommendations.
Yeah, it's like we're donating our content for free. Definitely not cool.