facebookexternalhit
Meta · Social network
facebookexternalhit gathers and caches the title, description and thumbnail of the shared page. Meta only reads Open Graph tags within the first 1 MB, and if your page was unavailable when it crawled, the Sharing Debugger forces a new crawl.
Fact sheet
- Operator
- Meta
- What it is for
- It reads your page when someone shares a link, to show the title, description and image.
- Assistant it feeds
- Does not feed any assistant's answers
- Counts towards the Parsigo score
- No. It is a social network bot, not an AI one.
- Official documentation
- developers.facebook.com/documentation/sharing/webmasters/web-crawlers
If you block it
When someone shares a link to your site, it may show without a title or image. Your score does not change.
Allow or block
A group of its own makes facebookexternalhit ignore the “User-agent: *” rules. If you have Disallow lines there that should still apply to it, repeat them inside its group. To allow it, writing nothing is usually enough.
Allow
User-agent: facebookexternalhit Allow: /
Block
User-agent: facebookexternalhit Disallow: /
Test it on your site
We run the diagnostic on your site and show you whether facebookexternalhit can get in, with the robots.txt line that decides it. Free, no sign-up.
Worth knowing
Builds the preview for links shared on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. Meta warns it may bypass robots.txt for security checks.