Meta-ExternalFetcher
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. Set up Dark Visitors agent analytics to see how often Meta-ExternalFetcher visits your website.
Detail
| Operator | Meta |
| Documentation | https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler |
Type
Expected Behavior
AI assistants make one-off visits to websites based on user requests, rather than crawling the web in any automatic fashion. This allows the underlying LLM to incorporate up-to-date information outside of its training data in its answers, using a technique called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
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.
Set Up Agent AnalyticsOther Websites
Robots.txt
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.
How Do I Block Meta-ExternalFetcher?
You can block Meta-ExternalFetcher 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 |
|---|---|
Meta-ExternalFetcher |
Should match instances of Meta-ExternalFetcher |
# robots.txt
# This should block Meta-ExternalFetcher
User-agent: Meta-ExternalFetcher
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.
Set Up Automatic Robots.txt