What is meta-externalfetcher?
meta-externalfetcher is used by Meta to perform user-initiated fetches of individual links from AI assistant product functions. You can set up Agent Analytics to see when meta-externalfetcher visits your website.
Overview
| Operated By | Meta |
| Source | Official Website |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | Yes |
| Insights Last Updated | September 15, 2026 |
Do you operate this agent? Contact us to suggest an update.
Category
Expected Behavior
meta-externalfetcher makes isolated, on-demand requests rather than crawling your site. Traffic follows user demand, ranging from sporadic fetches to steady visits for a popular assistant.
meta-externalfetcher's User Agent
| User Agent | Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/145.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/145.0.0.0 (compatible; meta-externalfetcher/1.1 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler)) |
How To Block meta-externalfetcher With Robots.txt
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block meta-externalfetcher from accessing your website, or use Automatic Robots.txt to block all AI assistants at once. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: meta-externalfetcher # https://knownagents.com/agents/meta-externalfetcher
Disallow: /Insights for meta-externalfetcher
As of September 15, 2026, this data reflects agent visits measured across thousands of websites using Agent Analytics, combined with daily scans of the top 1000 websites and their robots.txt files.
Robots.txt Blocked Percentage
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocking Trend
13% of top websites block meta-externalfetcher in their robots.txts.
Overall AI Assistant Traffic
0.5% of all web traffic came from AI assistants.
Top Visited Website Categories
The types of websites most frequently visited by meta-externalfetcher.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block meta-externalfetcher?
Usually not. Blocking meta-externalfetcher can keep your pages out of AI-generated answers and eliminate potential citation traffic. It does not improve traditional search rankings. For context, 13% of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for meta-externalfetcher.
Does meta-externalfetcher Follow Robots.txt Rules?
Yes. meta-externalfetcher 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-externalfetcher respects it.
Does meta-externalfetcher Access Private Content?
Not ordinarily. meta-externalfetcher fetches pages as an anonymous visitor without a stored login. Content protected by a paywall or login remains out of reach.
How Can I Tell if meta-externalfetcher Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks visits from meta-externalfetcher and every other known AI agent, crawler, and scraper, then authenticates each visit using meta-externalfetcher's published verification method. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user-agent string contains "meta-externalfetcher". Look for a single-page request with no follow-up navigation. A matching log entry alone is not proof because any bot can claim to be meta-externalfetcher.
Why Is meta-externalfetcher Visiting My Website?
A user asked Meta's assistant a question your page could help answer. meta-externalfetcher retrieved the page to support its response, often with a citation linking back to your site.