Facebook

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

Fetcher

Fetches web content on behalf of an app

Detail

Operated By	Meta
Last Updated	14 hours ago

Insights

Top Website Robots.txts

0% of top websites are blocking Facebook

Learn How →

Country of Origin

United States

Facebook normally visits from the United States

Global Traffic

See All Global Bot & LLM Insights →

The percentage of all internet traffic coming from Fetchers

Top Visited Website Categories

Finance

Shopping

Home and Garden

Autos and Vehicles

Beauty and Fitness

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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?

⚠️ Manual Robots.txt Edits Are Not Scalable

New agents are created every day. Instead, serve a continuously updating robots.txt that blocks new agents automatically.

Set Up Automatic Robots.txt

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)

# robots.txt
# This should block Facebook

User-agent: Facebook
Disallow: /