Verified Bots Directory

Directory / Feed fetchers

Apple Podcasts (iTMS)

Verifiable

Apple's podcast feed fetcher, which crawls only URLs associated with content registered on Apple Podcasts. Apple documents that iTMS traffic may come from applebot.apple.com hosts and that it does not follow robots.txt because it is not a general search crawler.

Operated by Apple · Official documentation

User agents

Patterns this directory matches, with real observed strings.

  • regex^i[Tt][Mm][Ss]$
  • observediTMS
  • observeditms

How to verify

Reverse-DNS check a client IP

dig -x <client-ip> +short   # expect a hostname matching *.applebot.apple.com

Reverse-DNS suffixes: *.applebot.apple.com

Good Bot Practices scorecard

  • Identifies honestly

    Stable UA token documented (1 pattern)

  • Verifiable

    Verifiable

  • Respects robots.txt

    Does not honor robots.txt

  • Behaves

    Crawl-rate behavior is operator-declared; not machine-verifiable from this dataset

  • Reachable operator

    Operator and documentation published

Measured against the Good Bot Practices.