Meta-ExternalAds is a bot in the advertising and marketing bots category, operated by Meta.
The Meta-ExternalAds crawler crawls the web for use cases such as improving advertising and other business-related products and services.
Advertising bots review landing pages, check ad placements and classify pages for brand safety and contextual targeting. Blocking ad verification bots can stop your ads or your inventory from serving, so allow the ones your ad partners use.
Sample user agent strings sent by Meta-ExternalAds:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/145.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 (compatible; meta-externalads/1.1 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler))meta-externalads/1.1 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler)Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/145.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 (compatible; meta-externalads/1.1 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler))Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/145.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 (compatible; meta-externalads/1.1 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler))Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/145.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/145.0.0.0 (compatible; meta-externalads/1.1 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler))Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/144.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/144.0.0.0 (compatible; meta-externalads/1.1 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler))Anyone can copy a user agent string. Transfon Security also checks where each request comes from, so a request that claims to be a known crawler but comes from the wrong network is treated as a fake, not as the real crawler.
Share of Meta-ExternalAds requests to sites protected by Transfon Security in the 7 days to 27 October 2026.
| United States | 100% |
| Facebook, Inc. AS32934 | 100% |
Meta-ExternalAds follows robots.txt, so these rules stop it crawling the paths you choose. robots.txt is a plain text file at the root of your domain, such as https://example.com/robots.txt.
User-agent: meta-externalads Disallow: /
User-agent: meta-externalads Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /search
User-agent: meta-externalads Allow: /blog/ Disallow: /
User-agent: meta-externalads Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /
User-agent: meta-externalads group, Meta-ExternalAds ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any that should still apply.meta-externalads from Meta-ExternalAds's user agent; check Meta's own documentation if it publishes a different robots.txt name.Treat robots.txt as a statement of your policy, and enforce it where requests arrive.
Ad verification and contextual crawlers like Meta-ExternalAds can decide whether your pages get demand. Blocking the ones your partners use can lower fill rates.
Transfon Security for publishersMeta-ExternalAds checks pages for ad platforms. Its visits to landing pages are not users, so exclude them from conversion data.
Transfon Security for advertisersAd platforms send crawlers like Meta-ExternalAds to check product landing pages. Keep it allowed so ads are not disapproved, and out of analytics.
Transfon Security for e-commerceAllow Meta-ExternalAds on landing pages linked from your ads, and keep it off the app.
Transfon Security for SaaS and APIsrobots.txt is a request, not an enforcement. Transfon Security shows Meta-ExternalAds by name in the Top Bots report, so you can see how often it visits and which pages it reads. Block or allow it with a User Agent rule, or slow it down with a rate limit decision rule.
Transfon Security
Meta-ExternalAds is a bot in the advertising and marketing bots category, operated by Meta. The Meta-ExternalAds crawler crawls the web for use cases such as improving advertising and other business-related products and services.
Yes. Meta-ExternalAds follows robots.txt, so a Disallow rule for the meta-externalads user agent stops it from crawling the paths you list.
Add "User-agent: meta-externalads" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To enforce it, block requests whose user agent contains "meta-externalads/" at your WAF. In Transfon Security that is one User Agent block rule.
No. robots.txt is voluntary, so Meta-ExternalAds may not follow it, and anyone can send Meta-ExternalAds's user agent, so a fake Meta-ExternalAds ignores your rule. Enforce the rule where requests arrive, at your WAF, and check the source network.
Advertising bots review landing pages, check ad placements and classify pages for brand safety and contextual targeting. Blocking ad verification bots can stop your ads or your inventory from serving, so allow the ones your ad partners use.
Transfon Security identifies every bot in this directory in your traffic reports, flags fake search crawlers, and lets you allow, block or rate limit each bot.
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