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sandeepgoyal
Level 1 (0 points)

Q: Is there some way to verify the AppleBot, maybe by a reverse DNS lookup?

Google has this way to verify that a bot accessing the server really is Googlebot by using a reverse DNS lookup. (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/80553?hl=en)

Is there some way to do that for AppleBot?

 

Right now if I do the same for AppleBot I don't get anything.

Posted on Jun 19, 2015 12:32 PM

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sandeepgoyal

Q: Is there some way to verify the AppleBot, maybe by a reverse DNS lookup?

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  • by LeRoiLeon,

    LeRoiLeon LeRoiLeon Feb 15, 2016 9:47 PM in response to sandeepgoyal
    Level 1 (9 points)
    Feb 15, 2016 9:47 PM in response to sandeepgoyal

    Maybe things have changed since last year.    Testing today, real Applebot does reverse resolve in the way described in the Google article.  Here is an example from today (some data removed):

     

    [user@localhost logs]# host 17.###.###.###

    ###.###.###.17.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer 17-###-###-###.applebot.apple.com.

    [user@localhost logs]# host 17-###-###-###.applebot.apple.com

    17-###-###-###.applebot.apple.com has address 17.###.###.###

     

    And an example web server log entry:

     

    17.###.###.### - - [16/Feb/2016:00:00:00 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" <return code> <bytes> "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/600.2.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0.2 Safari/600.2.5 (Applebot/0.1; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot)"

     

    I left 17. in my example as this is also a characteristic of Applebot, per Apple.