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MetaTraining crawler

Meta-ExternalAgent

Meta-ExternalAgent is a Meta crawler for indexing content directly for AI model training and product improvement use cases.

Training only. It does not decide whether you appear in answers.

Get the robots.txt ruleMeta documentation
Is Meta-ExternalAgent allowed on your site?3 Meta bots

Reads your live robots.txt and applies the same rules these crawlers use. Nothing is stored.

robots.txt token
Meta-ExternalAgent
Follows robots.txt
Yes, documented
How to verify it
Not published
Last checked
11 June 2026

Should you block Meta-ExternalAgent?

Only if you want your pages kept out of training. Meta AI finds and cites pages through Meta-WebIndexer and Meta-ExternalFetcher, which a Meta-ExternalAgent rule does not touch.

What blocking each Meta bot does
Meta botJobIf you block it
Meta-ExternalAgentThis pageTrainingBlocking it opts your site out of this direct Meta AI crawling path, but does not cover every Meta user-triggered fetcher.
Meta-WebIndexerSearchAllowing it can help Meta AI cite and link to your content; blocking it can reduce Meta AI search visibility.
Meta-ExternalFetcherUser fetchA hit usually represents an on-demand fetch for a specific URL rather than broad crawling.
facebookexternalhitOtherBlocking it can break rich link previews and Open Graph extraction in Meta surfaces.
meta-externaladsOtherBlocking it limits Meta’s crawling for those advertising and business uses. Meta documents separate crawlers for link previews, AI, and user-requested fetches.
robots.txt
User-agent: Meta-ExternalAgent
Disallow: /

Asks Meta-ExternalAgent not to crawl any page. Other Meta bots are unaffected. Add it to the robots.txt file at the root of your site, above any wider rules.

Ignored robots.txt?

Allowing Meta-ExternalAgent creates the possibility of retrieval. To find out whether Meta AI actually cites or recommends you, track your Meta AI mentions over time.

Also seen under Meta’s name, but not in its current documentation: FacebookBot. Rules naming them control no documented Meta crawler.

Spot it in your logs.

Match the name, then check where the request came from. Anyone can copy a user-agent. Search your own logs for Meta-ExternalAgent.

User-agentsource
meta-externalagent/1.1 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/web-crawlers)

Version numbers change. Match the highlighted name, not the whole string.

  1. 1

    Match the name

    Search your server or CDN log for Meta-ExternalAgent, case-insensitive. A match is a clue, not proof.

  2. 2

    Check the source

    Meta publishes no IP ranges, reverse DNS or signatures for Meta-ExternalAgent in the sources here, so it cannot be verified. Treat matches as unconfirmed.

Serve the content in HTML

The cited operator material does not verify JavaScript rendering. Serve useful HTML before client-side JavaScript where possible.

How active is Meta-ExternalAgent?

Measured across the sites connected to Trakkr, 27 July 2026 to 25 October 2026.

18%

of connected sites saw Meta-ExternalAgent in the four weeks to 25 October 2026. That is 19 of 104.

100%75%50%25%21%
Meta-ExternalAgent visited between 11% and 21% of connected sites each week from 27 July 2026 to 25 October 2026.

Share of connected sites it visited each week

Rank by reach
19 of 26
Typical site, per week
235 requests
Sites reached, 13 weeks
25 of 135

Most widespread AI crawlers

Share of connected sites each one visited, last four weeks.

  1. 1OAI-SearchBot84%
  2. 2ClaudeBot84%
  3. 3GPTBot67%
  4. 4Amazonbot61%
  5. 5ChatGPT-User56%
  6. 6PerplexityBot56%
  7. 7Applebot51%
  8. 19Meta-ExternalAgent18%
All 26 measured crawlers
How this is measured

Finalized daily crawler summaries from sites connected to Trakkr, grouped by the crawler named in each request. Trakkr’s own site is excluded. A site counts as reached in a week when it logged at least one request from Meta-ExternalAgent. The typical figure is the median weekly requests among the sites it reached.

  • This is a sample of connected sites, not the whole web.
  • A matching user-agent does not prove the named operator sent the request.
  • Requests are not unique pages, training use or citations.
  • Crawlers seen on fewer than 10 sites are not shown. Classic search crawlers such as Googlebot are not collected on every site, so they are left out.

Questions, answered.

Meta-ExternalAgent is a Meta crawler for indexing content directly for AI model training and product improvement use cases.

Sources.

Officially documented. Operator facts and Trakkr’s measurements keep separate dates.

  1. [1]
    Meta crawler documentation

    Officially documented · checked 11 June 2026

    developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/web-crawlers/

First verified 11 June 2026. Last source check 11 June 2026. Activity measured to 25 October 2026.

All AI crawlers

See which AI crawlers read your site.

Trakkr shows which bots, Meta-ExternalAgent included, visit which pages each day, and whether the answers they feed mention you.

14-day free trial. Cancel anytime.