Apple’s data-gathering robot, Applebot , which was developed to collect content and improve AI-powered search results, has recently been blocked by some major media outlets. According to Wired, major publishers including Facebook, Instagram, Craigslist, Tumblr, the New York Times, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, Vox Media, USA Today, and Wired’s parent company Condé Nast have blocked Applebot from collecting content, so Siri can’t access that information either.
What is Applebot that Siri gets information from and why is it being blocked?
Applebot is a data-gathering robot that Apple first introduced in 2014 and was officially introduced in 2015. The bot is tasked with collecting content from websites to improve search results for Apple services like Siri and Spotlight .
However, according to two recent studies, around 6% to 7% of high-traffic websites block this bot called Applebot-Extended. In fact, some studies found that 25% of tested sites blocked this bot.
The reason for such high blocking rates is that Applebot is a relatively unknown tool and is therefore ignored by many sites. In contrast, OpenAI’s bots are blocked at a rate of 53% and Google’s bots at a rate of 43%.
Applebot’s encounter with these blocks has raised new questions about how content aggregation and AI-powered search results on the internet should be organized.
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