meta-externalagent

Meta publishes no IP list on this page, so nothing can confirm a claim to be this crawler.

Published User-Agent

meta-externalagent/1.1 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/web-crawlers)

Proving it is real

Meta publishes no way to confirm this identity, so any request using this name has to be taken on trust.

robots.txt

User-agent: meta-externalagent
Disallow: /

Cloudflare custom rule expression

(http.user_agent contains "meta-externalagent")

nginx

if ($http_user_agent ~* "meta-externalagent") {
    return 403;
}

Matching a name only blocks bots that tell the truth about it. Before you do this, read what each decision costs.

Last reviewed Nov 2, 2026