meta-externalfetcher

What is meta-externalfetcher?

About

meta-externalfetcher is a web crawler used by Meta that performs user-initiated fetches of individual links to support specific product functions. It fetches content when a user shares a link on Meta platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or Messenger. You can see how often meta-externalfetcher 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 6 hours ago

Insights

Top Website Robots.txts

5%
5% of top websites are blocking meta-externalfetcher
Learn How →

Country of Origin

Unknown
meta-externalfetcher has no known country of origin

Global Traffic

See All Global Bot & LLM Insights →

The percentage of all internet traffic coming from Fetchers

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Robots.txt

Should I Block meta-externalfetcher?

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 meta-externalfetcher?

⚠️ 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 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.

# robots.txt
# This should block meta-externalfetcher

User-agent: meta-externalfetcher
Disallow: /

References