As you know, Apple confirmed the existence of AppleBot, their web crawler, last year. The main purpose of it is to help index content not just in apps but also the app content that references the web (like Google App Indexing but in the iOS world).

Well, folks over at WebmasterWorld are noticing the bot more often on their servers. It isn’t crazy activity but they are 100% noticing AppleBot crawling their pages more often.

None of these webmasters said they had any iOS apps that would result in a crawl. So maybe Apple is venturing out on the web to build up a web index?

Here is one webmaster who explained what he saw with AppleBot:

Have you noticed AppleBot? Here is the useragent information.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.