Directory/Categories/AI Assistant/Meta-ExternalFetcher

Meta-ExternalFetcher

Name: Meta-ExternalFetcher
Author: Meta

GoodBotVerifiedBOT

Crawler receives individual links at the user's initiative to support certain product features. Operated by Meta.

Operator website ↗

GoodBot

Assessment

AI Assistant

What is Meta-ExternalFetcher?

Meta-ExternalFetcher is a web crawler operated by Meta. Crawler receives individual links at the user's initiative to support certain product features.

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

Identification

Bot name

Meta-ExternalFetcher

Operator

Why it crawls your site

Meta-ExternalFetcher crawls websites to collect and process web content. It is operated by Meta as part of their web crawling infrastructure. If you see this bot in your server logs, it is a verified crawler and generally safe.

Block or allow Meta-ExternalFetcher

Block it

Add a Disallow rule for meta-externalfetcher/ 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-ExternalFetcher from crawling your entire site
User-agent: meta-externalfetcher/
Disallow: /

# Allow Meta-ExternalFetcher full access
User-agent: meta-externalfetcher/
Allow: /

Allow & verify

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