Meta-ExternalAgent is a bot in the AI crawlers category, operated by Meta.
Use cases such as training AI models or improving products by indexing content directly.
AI crawlers collect web pages in bulk to build training data for large language models and other AI systems. They take content without sending visitors back. Most publishers block them in robots.txt or at the WAF unless they have a licensing deal with the operator.
Sample user agent strings sent by Meta-ExternalAgent:
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-externalagent/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-externalagent/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-externalagent/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-externalagent/1.1 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler))meta-externalagent/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-externalagent/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-ExternalAgent requests to sites protected by Transfon Security in the 7 days to 27 October 2026.
| United States | 99% |
| Facebook, Inc. AS32934 | 97% |
| Google LLC AS396982 | 3% |
Meta-ExternalAgent 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-externalagent Disallow: /
User-agent: meta-externalagent Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /search
User-agent: meta-externalagent Allow: /blog/ Disallow: /
User-agent: meta-externalagent Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /
User-agent: meta-externalagent group, Meta-ExternalAgent ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any that should still apply.meta-externalagent from Meta-ExternalAgent'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.
Meta-ExternalAgent takes articles for AI training without sending readers back, and its page loads count as invalid traffic if your ad tags fire. Decide whether to license, limit or block it, and keep it out of ad requests.
Transfon Security for publishersVisits from Meta-ExternalAgent to your landing pages are not people. Keep them out of conversion, retargeting and audience data so you do not pay to reach a crawler.
Transfon Security for advertisersMeta-ExternalAgent can copy product descriptions, prices and reviews in bulk. Allow it on pages you want AI models to know about and block it on search, cart and account pages.
Transfon Security for e-commerceMeta-ExternalAgent can fetch documentation and public app pages at scale. Rate limit it so it does not slow the product for paying users.
Transfon Security for SaaS and APIsrobots.txt is a request, not an enforcement. Transfon Security shows Meta-ExternalAgent 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-ExternalAgent is a bot in the AI crawlers category, operated by Meta. Use cases such as training AI models or improving products by indexing content directly.
Yes. Meta-ExternalAgent follows robots.txt, so a Disallow rule for the meta-externalagent user agent stops it from crawling the paths you list.
Add "User-agent: meta-externalagent" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To enforce it, block requests whose user agent contains "meta-externalagent" at your WAF. In Transfon Security that is one User Agent block rule.
No. robots.txt is voluntary, so Meta-ExternalAgent may not follow it, and anyone can send Meta-ExternalAgent's user agent, so a fake Meta-ExternalAgent ignores your rule. Enforce the rule where requests arrive, at your WAF, and check the source network.
AI crawlers collect web pages in bulk to build training data for large language models and other AI systems. They take content without sending visitors back. Most publishers block them in robots.txt or at the WAF unless they have a licensing deal with the operator.
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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