What is Facebook?
About
Facebook is a fetcher operated by Meta. If you think this is incorrect or can provide additional detail about its purpose, please contact us. You can see how often Facebook visits your website by setting up Dark Visitors Agent Analytics.
Expected Behavior
Fetchers visit websites on-demand. They're normally dispatched by apps to present metadata about a link (e.g. the title and thumbnail image) to a user.
Type
Detail
| Operated By | Meta |
| Last Updated | 17 hours ago |
Insights
Top Website Robots.txts
Country of Origin
Global Traffic
The percentage of all internet traffic coming from Fetchers
Top Visited Website Categories
Robots.txt
Should I Block Facebook?
Probably not. If you block a fetcher, it won't be able to fetch the metadata it needs to display a link preview. Fewer people will click on the link to your website without this.
How Do I Block Facebook?
You can block Facebook or limit its access by setting user agent token rules in your website's robots.txt. Set up Dark Visitors Agent Analytics to check whether it's actually following them.
| User Agent String | meta-externalads/1.1 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler) |
# In your robots.txt ...
User-agent: Facebook # https://darkvisitors.com/agents/facebook
Disallow: /
⚠️ Manual Robots.txt Editing Is Not Scalable
New agents are created every day. We recommend setting up Dark Visitors Automatic Robots.txt if you want to block all agents of this type.