iMessage
iMessage is a single-page fetcher operated by Apple. It fetches one page (or a small set) when triggered by a user action, typically a link being shared on social media, a messaging app, or an RSS reader.
Volume tracks shares and clicks rather than crawl schedules. A trending link can produce a sudden spike, but iMessage will not crawl the rest of your site.
Blocking it usually means the link previews on the corresponding platform stop showing your title, image, and description.
See iMessage on your own site
Match the User-Agent header on incoming requests against the pattern below.
regex
Verify by IP
For higher confidence, also verify the source IP against the operator's published ranges. UA strings can be spoofed; IP ownership is harder to fake.
Renders JavaScript
No
IP verification
Published IP ranges
Crawl frequency
Per user action
Honors robots.txt
Yes
Honors Crawl-delay
Varies
Apple runs 7 bots in total. Each one is a separate user-agent so you can allow or block them independently.
Link Unfurler
4- AASA-Bot
- iMessage Link Preview
- iTMS
- iMessageYou are here
Search Engine
1Training Crawler
1Generic Crawler
1Should I let iMessage through?
In most cases, yes. Fetchers power link previews and feed readers. Blocking breaks the user experience on social and messaging platforms. If volume gets noisy, rate-limit it before you block it outright.
Does blocking iMessage affect my Google rankings?
No. iMessage is not a search-engine crawler. Your ranking on Google or Bing is unaffected by what you do here.
How do I confirm a request is really from iMessage?
Two checks. The User-Agent header should match a known iMessage string, and the request's source IP should fall inside Apple's published ranges. The User-Agent alone is trivially spoofable, so the IP check is what gives you confidence. Apple publishes the ranges so you can validate at the CDN or edge.
What breaks if I block iMessage?
Link previews, embeds, and unfurls on whatever surface iMessage feeds will stop rendering. Users sharing your URLs into Apple will see a bare link instead of a rich card. Usually that's the first thing people regret blocking.
How is iMessage different from Apple's other bots?
Apple splits work across multiple user-agents so site owners can decide on each one independently. Training crawlers, live-fetch agents, search indexers, and agentic browsers each get their own name. Worth scanning the rest of the Apple family above to see which ones actually matter for your site.
What's the cleanest way to control iMessage?
Two layers. Robots.txt for the polite crawlers that read it, and rules at your CDN or edge for the ones that don't. Rankly's Agent Experience handles both from a single config, so you can allow, block, rate-limit, or serve a stripped-down version per bot. Agent Analytics handles the observation half so you know which bots are actually worth a rule.
Verify everything above against the operator's own documentation.