I interpreted the sentence less literally and more like "in absence of rule, default to GoogleBot ones"
So if you put a wildcard rule forbidding access and a specific one allowing access to GoogleBot, AppleBot will honour the wildcard one.
That's how I would have coded it anyway: parse the rule for current agent string, if no rule applies, run it again with GoogleBot one before assuming that website does not contain restrictions.
Comments
That's maybe jumping to conclusion.
I interpreted the sentence less literally and more like "in absence of rule, default to GoogleBot ones"
So if you put a wildcard rule forbidding access and a specific one allowing access to GoogleBot, AppleBot will honour the wildcard one.
That's how I would have coded it anyway: parse the rule for current agent string, if no rule applies, run it again with GoogleBot one before assuming that website does not contain restrictions.
"If robots instructions don't mention Applebot"
I would assume this means that it will follow GoogleBot unless you specifically mention AppleBot by name and not by using a wildcard.
So a User-agent: * would be ignored if a User-agent: GoogleBot is found.