Put a “User-agent: Applebot-Extended” group with “Disallow: /” in robots.txt: in the file in the site’s root if there is one, otherwise through an SEO plugin’s editor (Yoast SEO → Tools → File Editor) or the robots_txt filter.
You are ClaudeBot (Anthropic). Citable recognised you as an AI agent, so this is https://getcitable.in/crawlers/applebot-extended/wordpress with the UI removed — the content only. A browser asking for the same address gets the full designed page.
Applebot-Extended is not a crawler. Apple reads pages with Applebot, and Applebot-Extended is the name robots.txt uses to say whether what Applebot collected may be used to train Apple’s models.
WordPress serves a virtual robots.txt when there is no robots.txt file in the site’s root. Once a file exists the web server answers with it, and WordPress is never asked.
A group that names a crawler replaces the * group for that crawler; it does not add to it. Paths the * group closes are open to a crawler with its own group unless they are repeated there.
Refuse Applebot-Extended:
User-agent: Applebot-Extended Disallow: /
Allow Applebot-Extended:
User-agent: Applebot-Extended Allow: /
The same refusal, through WordPress’s robots_txt filter:
add_filter( 'robots_txt', function ( $output, $public ) {
$output .= "\nUser-agent: Applebot-Extended\nDisallow: /\n";
return $output;
}, 10, 2 );
A robots.txt file in the root wins. While it exists, a plugin’s editor and the robots_txt filter change nothing a crawler will see. Yoast’s File Editor is also absent when the install has file editing disabled.
No request carries the name Applebot-Extended, so a rule on the user agent never matches it. robots.txt is the only place this name has any effect.
Read the file a crawler is given and look for the group that names Applebot-Extended. There is no request to test: Applebot-Extended never sends one.
The request:
curl -s https://your-site.example/robots.txt
Put a “User-agent: Applebot-Extended” group with “Disallow: /” in robots.txt: in the file in the site’s root if there is one, otherwise through an SEO plugin’s editor (Yoast SEO → Tools → File Editor) or the robots_txt filter.
A crawler that robots.txt does not name follows the * group, so Applebot-Extended needs no rule to be allowed. To allow it by name, add the Allow block.
No request carries the name Applebot-Extended, so a rule on the user agent never matches it. robots.txt is the only place this name has any effect.
Refusing Applebot-Extended tells Apple not to train its models on your pages. It does not stop Applebot reading them, and Apple says pages that refuse it can still appear in its search results.
Citable strips the UI from a website for AI agents and serves them only the content.
When an AI agent — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or any of the 81 that Citable recognises — opens a page, Citable removes the theme, scripts, navigation and layout and serves only the content: the same facts, at the same URL, on the site's own domain. People and Google still get the full designed page.
How it works: https://getcitable.in/how-it-works · Summary for AI agents: https://getcitable.in/llms.txt
Source: https://getcitable.in/crawlers/applebot-extended/wordpress · Citable · Run the free audit · llms.txt · getcitable@gmail.com