AI crawler index
What is meta-externalagent?
meta-externalagent is Meta's crawler for AI training. Crawls for uses such as training AI models or improving products by indexing content directly.
At a glance
| Operator | Meta |
|---|---|
| Purpose | AI training |
| User agent | meta-externalagent/1.1 |
| Obeys robots.txt | Yes, according to the operator |
| Published IP ranges | Not documented by the operator |
| How to verify it | Not documented by the operator |
| Official documentation | https://developers.facebook.com/documentation/sharing/webmasters/web-crawlers |
Should you block meta-externalagent?
It collects pages for model training, not for answering questions in real time. Blocking it keeps your future content out of that operator's training data, but it does not take you out of AI search answers, which other crawlers feed. Block it if you do not want your content in training sets; allow it if you want future models to know your brand.
Meta AI's search citations use a separate crawler, meta-webindexer. Meta may cache robots.txt for up to 24 hours.
How to block or allow meta-externalagent in robots.txt
Block it everywhere:
User-agent: meta-externalagent
Disallow: /Allow it everywhere:
User-agent: meta-externalagent
Allow: /Rules are matched by the token on the User-agent line. Test the result with the robots.txt tester before you publish it.
Other Meta crawlers
- meta-externalfetcher: User-triggered fetch
Check your own site
The AI crawler checker tells you which AI crawlers your robots.txt lets in, and the log file analyzer shows how often each one actually visits. For the bigger picture, see what AI crawlers are and the full AI crawler index.
FAQ
meta-externalagent questions
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