Crawls the web for uses such as training foundation AI models or improving products by indexing content directly.
Source: developers.facebook.comOperator
Meta
Job
Model training
Collects pages for training future models. Slower to pay off, and separate from search and citations.
robots.txt
Follows robots.txt
Meta says to block its crawlers you add a disallow rule for the crawler to robots.txt, and that changes can take up to 24 hours because robots.txt is cached.
Source: developers.facebook.commeta-externalagent/1.1
Add one of these groups to the robots.txt at the root of your domain.
A crawler obeys only the most specific group that names it (RFC 9309), so a named group does not inherit the rules under User-agent: *. Repeat any paths you keep private, as the example does with /admin/.
User-agent: meta-externalagent Allow: / Disallow: /admin/
User-agent: meta-externalagent Disallow: /
Read from the robots.txt we serve. We want AI engines to read and cite this site, so every AI crawler is allowed everywhere except the app, the API and the sign-in pages (/dashboard/, /api/, /login, /signup, /sign-in, /sign-up). The file also declares Content-Signal: ai-train=yes, search=yes, ai-input=yes.
User-agent: meta-externalagent Allow: / Disallow: /dashboard/ Disallow: /api/ Disallow: /login Disallow: /signup Disallow: /sign-in Disallow: /sign-up
See the whole file. The same rules repeat in every group, because a crawler that matches a named group ignores the wildcard one.
Sources, checked 2026-09-24