facebookexternalhit

Last updated 9 hours ago.

What is facebookexternalhit?

About

facebookexternalhit is a fetcher operated by Meta. It's not currently known to be artificially intelligent or AI-related. If you think that's incorrect or can provide more detail about its purpose, please contact us. You can see how often facebookexternalhit visits your website by setting up Dark Visitors agent analytics.

Detail

Operator Meta

Type

Fetcher
Fetches web content on behalf of an app

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.

Agent Analytics

Visits to Your Website

Half of your traffic probably comes from artificial agents, and there are more of them every day. Track their activity with agent analytics.

Top Websites

6%
6% of top websites are blocking facebookexternalhit in their robots.txt
Learn How →
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Robots.txt

Should I Block facebookexternalhit?

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 facebookexternalhit?

You can block facebookexternalhit 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 Token Description
facebookexternalhit Should match instances of facebookexternalhit
# robots.txt
# This should block facebookexternalhit

User-agent: facebookexternalhit
Disallow: /

Recommended Solution

Instead of doing this manually, use automatic robots.txt to keep your rules updated with the latest AI scrapers, crawlers, and assistants automatically.

Global Insights

Fetchers

The percentage of all internet traffic coming from fetchers

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