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meta-externalagent: Meta's training crawler

meta-externalagent is Meta's crawler for training its AI models and indexing content for its products.

See if it reads your siteMeta's docs

Picked is an AI visibility tool for agencies and B2B SaaS teams. It asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI answers the prompts your buyers ask, records which brands and pages they name, and writes the article built to become the source they quote.

At a glance

meta-externalagent in one table

Company
Meta
What it's for
Training: collected to train future models.
robots.txt token
meta-externalagent
Full user agent
meta-externalagent/1.1
Follows robots.txt
Follows it. Blocking it keeps the site's pages out of Meta's crawl for training. Meta says robots.txt changes can take 24 hours.
How to verify
Meta publishes no IP list or other way to check, so a visit with this user agent can't be verified.
Source
Meta's documentation, read on October 12, 2026.

Real data

What meta-externalagent read on a real site

LaunchOn.it, our own launch platform, tracked in Picked through Cloudflare from September 12 to October 11, 2026. One site, so read it as an example, not an average.

  • 31,814

    Requests in 30 days

  • 1,582

    Different pages read

  • 26 of 30

    Days it came

  • 100%

    Verified by Cloudflare as the real bot

Requests per dayBusiest day: 10,781
Sep 12Sep 19Sep 27Oct 4Oct 11

98% of its requests got a page back; 1% hit an address that doesn't exist.

What it read most
  • /products/19%
  • /categories/8%
  • /tech/5%
  • /use-cases/5%
  • /api/4%

By the first folder of the address. /_next/ holds the site's scripts and images.

robots.txt

Allow meta-externalagent

Allowing it lets your future pages into what the model learns, which is how it knows your brand before it searches. Opting out is a choice you can make if your content is your product: search and live-answer bots run under other names, so it doesn't take you out of today's answers.

robots.txt· Allow it
User-agent: meta-externalagentAllow: /

Needed only if a wider rule blocks it: robots.txt lets every bot in by default. A bot named in its own group ignores the User-agent: * group, so repeat your private paths there as Disallow lines. A block in your CDN or firewall has to be lifted there.

robots.txt· Or opt out of training
User-agent: meta-externalagentDisallow: /

A rule only changes what the bot reads next. To see whether meta-externalagent reads your pages now, and which ones, track AI crawlers on your server or see the full AI crawler list.

Questions

Frequently asked questions

From Meta's documentation, read on October 12, 2026.

meta-externalagent is Meta's crawler for training its AI models and indexing content for its products.

Blocking it keeps the site's pages out of Meta's crawl for training. Meta says robots.txt changes can take 24 hours.

Meta publishes no IP list or other way to check, so a visit with this user agent can't be verified.

Allowing it lets your future pages into what the model learns, which is how it knows your brand before it searches. Opting out is a choice you can make if your content is your product: search and live-answer bots run under other names, so it doesn't take you out of today's answers.

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