FacebookBot

What is FacebookBot?

About

FacebookBot is a web crawler used by Meta to download training data for its AI speech recognition technology. You can see how often FacebookBot visits your website by setting up Dark Visitors agent analytics.

Expected Behavior

It's generally unclear how AI data scrapers choose which websites to crawl and how often to crawl them. They might choose to visits websites with a higher information density more frequently, depending on the type of AI models they're training. For example, it would make sense that an agent training an LLM (Large Language Model) would favor sites with a lot of regularly updating text content.

Type

Detail

Insights

The percentage of all internet traffic coming from AI Data Scrapers

Robots.txt

Should I Block FacebookBot?

It's up to you. AI data scrapers usually download publicly available internet content, which is freely accessible by default. However, you might want to block them if you're concerned about attribution or how your creative work could be used in the resulting AI model.

How Do I Block FacebookBot?

You can block FacebookBot 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.

# robots.txt
# This should block FacebookBot

User-agent: FacebookBot
Disallow: /

References

• https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/bot/