Agent Ready Crawlers

The field guide to every AI crawler and agent at the door, and the vendors who decide who gets in.

Bot from Meta

Meta-ExternalAds

In short

Meta-ExternalAds is Meta's bot, filed under Other. The token to write in robots.txt is meta-externalads. The operator publishes nothing a site can check. The crawl of 2026-11-04 did not measure meta-externalads. Improves advertising and other business products, per Meta. Its user-agent entry: meta-externalads/1.1 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/web-crawlers). Meta shows robots.txt groups for meta-externalads in its example file.

Operator
Meta Vendor profile: Meta
Purpose
Other All other rows. Link previews, ad checks, dataset crawls, SEO tools and legacy tokens that fit none of the five purposes.
User-agent string
meta-externalads/1.1 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/web-crawlers)
robots.txt token
meta-externalads Matched case-insensitively (RFC 9309). The token and the user-agent string are different things.
Respects robots.txt

Yes, per operator

Meta shows robots.txt groups for meta-externalads in its example file. Source, read 2026-11-04.

Verification

Nothing published

The operator publishes no list, reverse DNS pattern or key directory a site owner can check. Documentation, read 2026-11-04.

IP ranges
Not published.
Rate behaviour
Not published.
Block rate

Not measured: the crawl checked 31 AI and search tokens, and meta-externalads is not one of them.

Documentation
developers.facebook.com, read 2026-11-04.

Note. Improves advertising and other business products, per Meta.

Allow and refuse lines

To allow meta-externalads

User-agent: meta-externalads
Allow: /

To refuse meta-externalads

User-agent: meta-externalads
Disallow: /

Refusing or allowing in robots.txt states a preference. Enforcement of a refusal belongs in your WAF; see how to verify the identity above.

Meta in the Verification Ledger

User agent strings only; the page recommends IP allowlisting but links no list. Publishes nothing for Muse. All operators.

IP lists
publishes nothing
Reverse DNS
publishes nothing
Key directory
publishes nothing
Cloudflare
not checked
Visa TAP registry
no public operator-level registration found (checked 2026-11-04)
Mastercard Agent Pay
no public operator-level registration found (checked 2026-11-04)

Other Meta rows

Sources

Last reviewed 2026-11-04