facebookexternalhit

What is facebookexternalhit?

About

FacebookExternalHit is Meta's web crawler that fetches content from apps or websites shared on Facebook, Instagram, or Messenger to gather, cache, and display information like titles, descriptions, and thumbnail images. You can see how often facebookexternalhit visits your website by setting up Dark Visitors Agent Analytics.

Expected Behavior

Fetchers visit websites on-demand. They're normally dispatched by apps to present metadata about a link (e.g. the title and thumbnail image) to a user.

Type

Fetcher
Fetches web content on behalf of an app

Detail

Operated By Meta
Last Updated 6 hours ago

Insights

Top Website Robots.txts

7%
7% of top websites are blocking facebookexternalhit
Learn How →

Country of Origin

United States
facebookexternalhit normally visits from the United States

Global Traffic

See All Global Bot & LLM Insights →

The percentage of all internet traffic coming from Fetchers

Top Visited Website Categories

Finance
Autos and Vehicles
Beauty and Fitness
Pets and Animals
News
How Do I Get These Insights for My Website?
Use the WordPress plugin, Node.js package, or API to get started in seconds.
Set Up Agent Analytics

Robots.txt

Should I Block facebookexternalhit?

Probably not. If you block a fetcher, it won't be able to fetch the metadata it needs to display a link preview. Fewer people will click on the link to your website without this.

How Do I Block facebookexternalhit?

You can block facebookexternalhit or limit its access by setting user agent token rules in your website's robots.txt. Set up Dark Visitors Agent Analytics to check whether it's actually following them.

How Do I Block All Fetchers?
Serve a continuously updating robots.txt that blocks new fetchers automatically.
Set Up Automatic Robots.txt
User Agent String facebookexternalhit/1.1 (+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php) 
# In your robots.txt ...

User-agent: facebookexternalhit # https://darkvisitors.com/agents/facebookexternalhit
Disallow: /

⚠️ Manual Robots.txt Editing Is Not Scalable

New agents are created every day. We recommend setting up Dark Visitors Automatic Robots.txt if you want to block all agents of this type.

References