Directory/Categories/Advertising & Marketing/Meta-ExternalAds

Meta-ExternalAds

GoodBotVerifiedBOT

The Meta-ExternalAds crawler crawls the web for use cases such as improving advertising and other business-related products and services. Operated by Meta.

Operator website ↗

GoodBot

Assessment

Advertising & Marketing

What is Meta-ExternalAds?

Meta-ExternalAds is a web crawler operated by Meta. The Meta-ExternalAds crawler crawls the web for use cases such as improving advertising and other business-related products and services.

Helpful — Verified, safe crawler. Respects robots.txt and provides operator documentation.

Identification

Bot name

Meta-ExternalAds

Operator

How we rated this bot

Verified by Cloudflare, which confirms who runs it, with no widespread reports of abuse.

Names itself honestly

Yes

Verified by Cloudflare

Yes

Says it follows robots.txt and opt-outs

Not stated

Ignores site rules

None found

Disguises itself or evades blocks

None found

Overloads sites

None found

How widely people complain

One or two isolated anecdotes from individual site owners

Reddit discussion

There is no Reddit discussion of this bot in the evidence

What we read

Why it crawls your site

Meta-ExternalAds crawls websites to collect data for advertising and marketing purposes. It is operated by Meta as part of their advertising infrastructure. If you see this bot in your server logs, it is a verified crawler and generally safe.

Block or allow Meta-ExternalAds

Block it

Add a Disallow rule for meta-externalads/1.1 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 Meta-ExternalAds from crawling your entire site
User-agent: meta-externalads/1.1
Disallow: /

# Allow Meta-ExternalAds full access
User-agent: meta-externalads/1.1
Allow: /

Allow & verify

Ensure your robots.txt allows meta-externalads/1.1. Verify requests are genuine by checking the user-agent string and referring to Meta's documentation.