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What is Meta-ExternalAgent?

Meta-ExternalAgent is a Meta crawler. Meta says it crawls the web for use cases such as training AI models or improving products by indexing content directly.

Operator
Meta
Purpose
Crawls for training AI models or improving Meta products.
robots.txt token
meta-externalagent
Example user agent
meta-externalagent/1.1
How to verify
Meta's crawler page gives no IP list and no reverse DNS domain for Meta-ExternalAgent.
Operator documentation
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/web-crawlers/
Last verified

How often is Meta-ExternalAgent impersonated?

No published method checks a request that claims to be Meta-ExternalAgent, so we cannot say which claims are false and show no share.

This directory measures requests between 14 July 2026 and 10 October 2026. The fake crawler report covers its own, earlier window (late June to 21 September 2026), so its figures differ from the ones here. Read it for the method.

Have a request that claims to be Meta-ExternalAgent? Check its IP address.

Should you block Meta-ExternalAgent?

Allow it if
you are content for Meta to use your pages this way.
Block it if
you do not want your content used for Meta's AI training.
What blocking changes
Meta's crawler stops collecting your pages for AI training and product indexing. Link previews use a different crawler.

To block it, add this group to your robots.txt. Meta documents robots.txt control for this crawler.

User-agent: meta-externalagent
Disallow: /

robots.txt only asks. It does nothing against a client that ignores it or only pretends to be Meta-ExternalAgent. Stopping those takes verification at your edge.

Related bots

  • facebookexternalhit (Meta): Builds link previews when content is shared on Meta's apps.
  • Meta-ExternalFetcher (Meta): Fetches individual links on behalf of Meta product users.
  • Meta-WebIndexer (Meta): Crawls pages to improve the search results of Meta AI.
  • Amazonbot (Amazon): Crawls to improve Amazon products; may be used to train Amazon AI models.
  • CCBot (Common Crawl): Builds Common Crawl's open web archive, free for anyone to reuse.
  • ClaudeBot (Anthropic): Collects web content that could contribute to Claude model training.

See which bots reach your site, and which of them are who they claim to be.

Request a site audit