meta-externalads

Crawls pages to improve Meta's advertising and business products.

Follows robots.txt

User agent token: meta-externalads
Operator: Meta
Verification: None published
Source: Meta documentation

What a bot for ads, link previews or SEO tools does

These bots work for a specific product: checking an ad's landing page, drawing the preview when a link is shared, or collecting data for an SEO tool. Some only visit because the site owner asked them to.

Block or allow meta-externalads in robots.txt

Add one of these to the robots.txt file at the root of your domain. Crawlers read it before they fetch anything else.

Block meta-externalads

User-agent: meta-externalads
Disallow: /

Allow meta-externalads

User-agent: meta-externalads
Allow: /

More from Meta

meta-externalagentCrawls pages to train Meta's AI models and to improve its products. meta-webindexerReads pages to improve the search results in Meta AI. meta-externalfetcherFetches a link when a person asks Meta AI to open it. facebookexternalhitBuilds the link preview when someone shares your page in one of Meta's apps.

Browse all 66 crawlersAI and search bots from 16 companies, with the rules to block or allow each one.

Questions, answered.

meta-externalads is a bot for ads, link previews or SEO tools run by Meta. Crawls pages to improve Meta's advertising and business products.

Yes. Meta says meta-externalads follows robots.txt.

Add "User-agent: meta-externalads" and "Disallow: /" to your robots.txt.

Meta publishes no IP list for meta-externalads, so it can only be recognised by its user agent, which other bots can copy.

No. meta-externalads works for one product, such as ad checks, link previews or SEO data, rather than bringing visitors.

Only if you don't use the product it works for. Blocking meta-externalads is safe for your search rankings.

In its own documentation at https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/web-crawlers. Every fact on this page comes from there.

Still have questions? We're happy to help.

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