meta-externalfetcher: Meta's live-answer fetcher
meta-externalfetcher fetches a single link when a person asks Meta's AI for it, including for agent tasks on a site.
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-externalfetcher in one table
- Company
- Meta
- What it's for
- Live answer: fetched while answering someone's question.
- robots.txt token
meta-externalfetcher- Full user agent
meta-externalfetcher/1.1- Follows robots.txt
- May ignore it. Meta says this fetcher may bypass robots.txt, because a person asked for the page.
- 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.
robots.txt
Allow meta-externalfetcher
Allow it. Each visit is a person asking an AI something your page helps answer, right now. Blocking it costs you that answer wherever the bot honours the rule.
User-agent: meta-externalfetcherAllow: /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.
A rule only changes what the bot reads next. To see whether meta-externalfetcher reads your pages now, and which ones, track AI crawlers on your server or see the full AI crawler list.
Related
Other Meta crawlers
Questions
Frequently asked questions
From Meta's documentation, read on October 12, 2026.
meta-externalfetcher fetches a single link when a person asks Meta's AI for it, including for agent tasks on a site.
Meta says this fetcher may bypass robots.txt, because a person asked for the page.
Meta publishes no IP list or other way to check, so a visit with this user agent can't be verified.
Allow it. Each visit is a person asking an AI something your page helps answer, right now. Blocking it costs you that answer wherever the bot honours the rule.
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