Meta-ExternalFetcher

Last updated 10 minutes ago.

What is Meta-ExternalFetcher?

About

Meta-ExternalFetcher is dispatched by Meta AI products in response to user prompts, when they need to fetch an individual links.

You can set up agent analytics to see when Meta-ExternalFetcher visits your website.

Detail

Operator Meta
Documentation https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler

Type

AI Assistant
Intelligently performs tasks on behalf of a user

Expected Behavior

AI assistants generally make one-off visits to websites based on user requests, rather than crawling the web in any automatic fashion.

Insights

Meta-ExternalFetcher Visiting Your Website

Half of your traffic probably comes from artificial agents, and there are more of them every day. Track their activity with the API or WordPress plugin.

Set Up Agent Analytics

Other Websites

4%
4% of top websites are blocking Meta-ExternalFetcher
Learn How →

Access Control

Should I Block Meta-ExternalFetcher?

Probably not. AI assistants visit websites directly on behalf of human users, so blocking them will effectively block those users. This could lead to a poor user experience and possible negative sentiment about your website. Not blocking AI assistants will allow more human users to use your website as they choose.

Using Robots.txt

You can block Meta-ExternalFetcher or limit its access by setting user agent token rules in your website's robots.txt. We recommend setting up agent analytics to check whether it's actually following them.

User Agent Token Description
Meta-ExternalFetcher Should match instances of Meta-ExternalFetcher 
# robots.txt
# This should block Meta-ExternalFetcher

User-agent: Meta-ExternalFetcher
Disallow: /

Instead of doing this manually, you can use the API or Wordpress plugin to keep your robots.txt updated with the latest known AI scrapers, crawlers, and assistants automatically.

Set Up Automatic Robots.txt