AI bots · Training
Meta-ExternalAgent
Crawls the web for use cases such as training foundation AI models or improving products by indexing content directly.
- Run by
- Meta
- Type
- Training bot
- robots.txt token
Meta-ExternalAgent- User-agent string
meta-externalagent/1.1- Honours robots.txt
- Yes. Meta documents robots.txt Disallow for this crawler. Meta says crawlers may cache robots.txt for up to 24 hours (docs updated May 21, 2026).
- Official docs
- developers.facebook.com
Block it
User-agent: Meta-ExternalAgent Disallow: /
Allow it
User-agent: Meta-ExternalAgent Allow: /
A named group replaces the * group for this bot, so repeat any private-path Disallow lines in it. Firewalls (Cloudflare AI Crawl Control, Vercel AI Bots ruleset) can block it even when robots.txt allows it. See fixes per stack.
Other Meta bots
- Meta-WebIndexer (search)
- Meta-ExternalFetcher (user fetch)
Other training bots
- GPTBot (OpenAI)
- ClaudeBot (Anthropic)
- Google-Extended (Google)
- Applebot-Extended (Apple)
- CCBot (Common Crawl)
- Amazonbot (Amazon)
- MistralAI-Training (Mistral AI)
- Bytespider (ByteDance)