facebookexternalhit
facebookexternalhit is Meta's crawler that visits your site the moment a user shares your URL on Facebook, Instagram, or Messenger. Its sole job is to read the title, description, and image you have set in your Open Graph tags to build the preview card. It does not collect data to train AI models or to power any search index. For your business, this means that if your Open Graph tags are properly configured, your links will look far more compelling whenever someone shares them on Meta's platforms.
- User-agent
facebookexternalhitfacebookexternalhit/1.1 (+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php)- Does it respect robots.txt?
- Partially
- Official documentation
- https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/web-crawlers/
How to allow it in your robots.txt
User-agent: facebookexternalhit
Allow: /How to block it (not recommended)
User-agent: facebookexternalhit
Disallow: /Frequently asked questions
Should I block facebookexternalhit?
Generally, no. If you block it, whenever someone shares your website on Facebook or Instagram the preview will appear blank or with incorrect information — no image, no clear title. That makes the link less eye-catching and results in fewer clicks. Blocking it does not protect any sensitive data; it just makes your content look worse across Meta's networks.
Does it affect my visibility on AI tools like ChatGPT?
Not directly. facebookexternalhit does not feed AI models or knowledge bases. Its purpose is strictly to render link previews on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. If your goal is to appear in AI-generated answers, this bot has no bearing on that.
How do I know if facebookexternalhit is visiting my site?
Search for "facebookexternalhit" in your server's access logs or in your CDN dashboard — for example, Cloudflare. Every time someone shares a URL from your site on a Meta platform, the crawler makes a visit that gets logged with that name in the user-agent field.