Meta
facebookexternalhit is Meta's crawler that fetches web pages to generate link previews when URLs are shared on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger.
Current Rank
#9
Traffic Share
2.94%
Operator
Meta
Category
Social Media Crawler
facebookexternalhit is a web crawler operated by Meta that visits web pages whenever a URL is shared on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, or WhatsApp. Its primary purpose is to fetch Open Graph metadata (title, description, image) to generate rich link previews.
This crawler has been active since the early days of Facebook. Every time someone shares a link on any Meta platform, facebookexternalhit visits the page to pull the preview information.
Unlike Meta-ExternalAgent, this crawler is not used for AI training. It serves a purely functional purpose: making shared links look good on social media.
You can block facebookexternalhit via robots.txt, but this is generally not recommended:
robots.txt
User-agent: facebookexternalhit Disallow: /
Blocking facebookexternalhit will prevent link previews from appearing when your URLs are shared on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. Links will appear as plain text URLs without images, titles, or descriptions, significantly reducing click-through rates.
User-Agent string: facebookexternalhit/1.1 (+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php)
Fetches Open Graph tags (og:title, og:description, og:image)
Visits pages on-demand when links are shared
Caches preview data (use Facebook Sharing Debugger to refresh)
Not used for AI training — purely for link previews
Separate from Meta-ExternalAgent (AI training crawler)
facebookexternalhit directly affects how your content appears when shared on social media. Properly formatted Open Graph tags ensure your links display with compelling titles, descriptions, and images.
Blocking this crawler means your links will appear as plain URLs without previews on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, which typically results in much lower engagement and click-through rates.
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