facebookbot
GoodBotCommunity-sourcedA crawler used by Meta to fetch and process website content for sharing features across Facebook and other Meta platforms. Operated by Meta Platforms, Inc..
What is facebookbot?
Facebookbot is the primary automated agent operated by Meta to crawl web pages shared by users on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. It parses HTML content to extract Open Graph tags, page titles, and descriptions, ensuring that shared links display accurate thumbnails and summaries. By maintaining a cache of this metadata, the bot facilitates a seamless user experience when content is distributed across Meta's social ecosystem.
Identification
Why it crawls your site
The bot crawls websites to ensure that when a user posts a URL, the platform can render a rich, informative preview card. It specifically looks for Open Graph protocol tags to determine how a page should be represented visually and textually. Website administrators can verify the bot's authenticity by performing a reverse DNS lookup on the requesting IP address to ensure it resolves to a domain owned by Meta, typically within the facebook.com or fbcdn.net subdomains.
IP ranges
Requests from facebookbot originate from these published ranges. For strict verification, match the source IP against this list in addition to checking the user-agent and reverse-DNS.
Block or allow facebookbot
Add a Disallow rule for facebookbot in your robots.txt file. You can also block at the server level using your web server configuration or CDN firewall rules to filter requests matching the user-agent string.
# Block facebookbot from crawling your entire site User-agent: facebookbot Disallow: / # Allow facebookbot full access User-agent: facebookbot Allow: /
Ensure your robots.txt allows facebookbot. Verify requests by checking the user-agent string.
Traffic & trends
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From the community
Recent Reddit discussion mentioning this bot.
Data sources
This profile is compiled from the following sources.