What is meta-externalagent?

Block meta-externalagent if you want more control over whether your work is used for AI training. Allowing it may increase the chance that your brand appears in AI-generated answers, but either choice leaves traditional search rankings unchanged. For context, 20% of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for meta-externalagent.

Yes. meta-externalagent is expected to follow robots.txt rules, so a disallow rule is the appropriate first step. Automatic Robots.txt can add and maintain that rule, while Agent Analytics lets you verify whether meta-externalagent respects it.

Not through legitimate access. meta-externalagent primarily targets public content, but some training-data scrapers also attempt to collect gated or paywalled pages. If content loads without authentication, assume it can be collected.

Agent Analytics tracks visits from meta-externalagent and every other known AI agent, crawler, and scraper, then authenticates each visit using meta-externalagent's published verification method. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user-agent string contains "meta-externalagent". Look for high page counts, short gaps between requests, and deep traversal through linked content. A matching log entry alone is not proof because any bot can claim to be meta-externalagent.

Your content matched the criteria Meta set for a training dataset. meta-externalagent typically discovers pages through external links, sitemaps, and seed lists rather than because someone selected your site individually.