# Meta-ExternalAgent

Meta's crawler: what it does, robots.txt handling per the operator, and observed behaviour on this property.

- Operator: Meta
- Purpose: Trains AI models; indexing | operator's words: "crawls the web for use cases such as training foundation AI models or improving products by indexing content"
- robots.txt token: `meta-externalagent`
- Appears in access logs: yes
- User-agent: `meta-externalagent/1.1`
- robots.txt: Controlled via robots.txt. Meta's crawler page documents the meta-externalagent robots.txt token and notes no bypass conditions for it, unlike its user-triggered sibling Meta-ExternalFetcher.
- IP list: not published
- Verification: Meta publishes no IP list for it on the crawler page.
- Documentation: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/web-crawlers (read 2026-08-04)

Block it:
```
User-agent: meta-externalagent
Disallow: /
```

Observed on this property (logged since 2026-08-04):
- Not observed here yet.

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Source: https://agentvisibilitytools.com/crawlers/meta-externalagent/ · HTML version of this page.
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