Directory/Categories/Social Media Marketing/Apple App Site Association

Apple App Site Association

GoodBotVerifiedBOT

The Apple App Site Association is used to support "Universal Links" that can open in native iOS apps. The bot requests a specific path for a given hostname, which returns metadata that associates certain URL patterns with native iOS apps. Operated by Apple.

Operator website ↗

GoodBot

Assessment

Social Media Marketing

What is Apple App Site Association?

Apple App Site Association is a web crawler operated by Apple. The Apple App Site Association is used to support "Universal Links" that can open in native iOS apps. The bot requests a specific path for a given hostname, which returns metadata that associates certain URL patterns with native iOS apps.

Helpful — Verified, safe crawler. Respects robots.txt and provides operator documentation.

Identification

Bot name

Apple App Site Association

Operator

Apple

How we rated this bot

Verified by Cloudflare, which confirms who runs it, with no widespread reports of abuse.

Names itself honestly

Yes

Verified by Cloudflare

Yes

Says it follows robots.txt and opt-outs

Not stated

Ignores site rules

None found

Disguises itself or evades blocks

None found

Overloads sites

None found

How widely people complain

No complaint about this bot in the evidence

Reddit discussion

Discussion is neutral or practical, such as how to allow or block it

What we read

Why it crawls your site

Apple App Site Association crawls websites to collect and process web content. It is operated by Apple as part of their web crawling infrastructure. If you see this bot in your server logs, it is a verified crawler and generally safe.

Block or allow Apple App Site Association

Block it

Add a Disallow rule for AASA-Bot/ in your robots.txt file. You can also block at the server level using your web server configuration or CDN firewall rules to filter requests matching the user-agent string.

# Block Apple App Site Association from crawling your entire site
User-agent: AASA-Bot/
Disallow: /

# Allow Apple App Site Association full access
User-agent: AASA-Bot/
Allow: /