meta-externalagent
Meta's crawler for use cases such as training foundation AI models or improving products by indexing content directly. Meta publishes no IP list for it.
| Operator | Meta |
|---|---|
| Purpose | Training — Meta AI models and products |
| robots.txt token | meta-externalagent |
| User-Agent | meta-externalagent/1.1 |
| Obeys robots.txt | Yes, according to the publisher |
| Official IP ranges | Not published |
| Reverse DNS | Not documented |
| Official documentation | https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/web-crawlers/ |
Live activity of meta-externalagent
No visit from meta-externalagent recorded on iabig.com over the last 30 days.
Last updated: 2026-10-25 12:07:01 UTC. See the Observatory
What meta-externalagent does
Meta-ExternalAgent crawls the web for use cases that Meta describes as training foundation AI models or improving products by indexing content directly. The phrase "such as" means that list is not exhaustive.
What Meta states:
- To block its crawlers, add a
Disallowrule for the relevant crawler in robots.txt. Meta's own example targetsmeta-externalagent. - Meta says it prefers industry-standard robots.txt over non-standard formats such as NoAI tags.
- The published user-agent string is short:
meta-externalagent/1.1, sometimes followed by a link to the documentation.
Meta runs other crawlers with separate roles: meta-webindexer to improve Meta AI search results (Meta says allowing it helps it cite and link your content), meta-externalads for advertising and business products, and meta-externalfetcher for user-requested fetches. Blocking meta-externalagent does not cover any of them.
Meta publishes no IP list and no verification method for this crawler, so a request claiming to be meta-externalagent cannot be authenticated from official documentation alone. Questions can be sent to webmasters@meta.com.
Block or allow meta-externalagent
Meta should stop collecting your pages with this crawler, including for model training. Being cited in Meta AI relies on meta-webindexer, which is configured separately.
To block it, add this to your robots.txt:
User-agent: meta-externalagent
Disallow: /To allow it explicitly (copy any private rules you have):
User-agent: meta-externalagent
Allow: /A group naming meta-externalagent replaces the User-agent: * group for it. Build a complete robots.txt with the generator and check it with the tester.
Verify a meta-externalagent visit
Anyone can write “meta-externalagent” in a User-Agent. Paste the IP address and User-Agent from your logs into the IP verifier to know whether the visit is genuine.
Other Meta crawlers
- meta-externalfetcher — Browsing