Directory/Categories/Page Preview/FacebookExternalHit

FacebookExternalHit

Name: FacebookExternalHit
Author: Meta

GoodBotVerifiedBOT

The primary purpose of FacebookExternalHit is to crawl the content of an app or website that was shared on one of Meta’s family of apps, such as Facebook, Instagram, or Messenger. The link might have been shared by copying and pasting or by using the Facebook social plugin. This crawler gathers, caches, and displays information about the app or website such as its title, description, and thumbnail image. Operated by Meta.

Operator website ↗

GoodBot

Assessment

Page Preview

What is FacebookExternalHit?

FacebookExternalHit is a web crawler operated by Meta. The primary purpose of FacebookExternalHit is to crawl the content of an app or website that was shared on one of Meta’s family of apps, such as Facebook, Instagram, or Messenger. The link might have been shared by copying and pasting or by using the Facebook social plugin. This crawler gathers, caches, and displays information about the app or website such as its title, description, and thumbnail image.

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

Identification

Bot name

FacebookExternalHit

Operator

Why it crawls your site

FacebookExternalHit crawls websites to generate link previews and thumbnails for shared URLs. It is operated by Meta as part of their link preview infrastructure. If you see this bot in your server logs, it is a verified crawler and generally safe.

Block or allow FacebookExternalHit

Block it

Add a Disallow rule for facebookexternalhit 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 FacebookExternalHit from crawling your entire site
User-agent: facebookexternalhit
Disallow: /

# Allow FacebookExternalHit full access
User-agent: facebookexternalhit
Allow: /

Allow & verify

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