Apple Just Told You Which of Its Robots You Can Block Without Disappearing From the New Siri

Welcome to the AI Industry Report, daily AI news for small business, built by AI, about AI, from the Agentic Marketing Academy. It’s Tuesday, September 8th. Four stories today, and the first one is Apple quietly telling every website owner which of its robots you can block without disappearing from the new Siri. Let’s go.

Apple’s event is tomorrow, and iOS 27, with the rebuilt Siri that answers by searching the web, ships in the weeks after. Over the weekend Apple added one sentence to its Applebot help page: site rules for Applebot-Extended are not considered in ranking for Search. Apple runs two robots. Applebot is the crawler that puts your website into Siri, Spotlight, and Safari search. Applebot-Extended isn’t a crawler. It’s a switch in your robots file that says whether Apple can use what it crawled to train its AI models. Owners have been nervous about that switch, because nobody can say for certain what blocking an AI bot does to your rankings. Apple just answered for its own house: block the training bot, keep the search visibility. The page also names a third control, a nosnippet tag that keeps a page out of Siri’s AI-written answers but leaves it in the results. Three switches, three clear outcomes, one week before Cloudflare starts blocking mixed-use bots by default on September 15th. The one thing you don’t want to block is plain Applebot. That’s the door to a billion iPhones. Source: Apple’s Applebot documentation, updated September 4th, reported by Search Engine Roundtable, September 7th.

Second, Google Ads will now read the deals on your website and put them in your ads for you. A new help page, spotted by Hana Kobzová, describes automated promotions. If a page on your site says 20 percent off through Sunday, Google pulls that out, checks that it’s still live, and attaches it to your Search and Performance Max ads, marked “Google AI” in your assets list. It only fires on campaigns with location assets, so it’s aimed at businesses with a physical address, and it skips any campaign where you already run a promotion by hand. Two things to do. One: go to Assets, the three-dot menu, Advanced settings, and see whether automated promotions is on. Two, the real one: whatever your website says is on sale is now potential ad copy. That spring special page you never took down could show up in a September ad. Source: Google Ads Help documentation, via PPC News Feed and Search Engine Roundtable, September 7th.

Third, a warning for anyone who used AI to generate a pile of pages. A site owner asked Google’s John Mueller why their site had stopped ranking. Mueller said it sounded like a programmatic SEO play: take a list of cities, services, and attributes, generate every combination, and with AI, do it in an afternoon. In his words, that often leads to a site that’s spam, borderline spam, or low quality, and Google’s systems have possibly lost faith in your site based on those old pages. Recovery takes time and significant effort, on the scale of a core update. If a tool built you two hundred “roofer in this town” pages that are the same paragraph with the town swapped, this is about you. The damage isn’t those pages. It’s the trust in your whole domain. Source: John Mueller on Bluesky, reported by Search Engine Roundtable, September 7th.

Last, if you run Shopping ads and your click-through rate has been climbing, hold the celebration. Mike Ryan at Smarter Ecommerce looked at 175 billion Shopping ad impressions across hundreds of accounts. Since AI Overviews expanded, median impressions fell from about 1.85 million to 1.4 million, while click-through rate rose from 1.2 to nearly 1.55 percent. Clicks were flat. The ads aren’t working better. They’re showing less. His theory: Google serves an AI Overview where an ad click is unlikely and saves Shopping ads for searches where it isn’t. He calls it a hypothesis. Judge your Shopping campaigns on clicks and impressions this fall, not click-through rate. Source: Mike Ryan of Smarter Ecommerce on LinkedIn, reported by Search Engine Land, September 7th.

So here’s your one thing for today. Type your website address, then slash robots dot T X T, into a browser, and search the page for Applebot. If plain Applebot is blocked, unblock it before iOS 27 lands. If only Applebot-Extended is blocked, you’re fine, and now you know it.

That’s today’s report. Transcript and every source linked at A I industry report dot com.

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