Meta
AI training
meta-externalagent
Crawls pages to train Meta's AI models and to improve its products.
Follows robots.txt- User agent token
- meta-externalagent
- Operator
- Meta
- Verification
- None published
- Source
- Meta documentation
What an AI training crawler does
A training crawler gathers public pages that may end up in the data used to train AI models. It sends no visitors back, so blocking it is the usual choice for sites that don't want their content used that way.
Block or allow meta-externalagent 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-externalagent
User-agent: meta-externalagent
Disallow: /Allow meta-externalagent
User-agent: meta-externalagent
Allow: /More from Meta
Questions, answered.
meta-externalagent is an AI training crawler run by Meta. Crawls pages to train Meta's AI models and to improve its products.
Yes. Meta says meta-externalagent follows robots.txt.
Add "User-agent: meta-externalagent" and "Disallow: /" to your robots.txt.
Meta publishes no IP list for meta-externalagent, so it can only be recognised by its user agent, which other bots can copy.
No. meta-externalagent collects pages for model training and sends no visitors back.
Block it if you don't want your pages used to train models. It sends no visitors, so blocking it costs you no traffic.
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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