What is Meta-ExternalAds?
It crawls the web for uses such as improving advertising and other business-related products and services.
A bot that fits none of the groups above, such as an ad review crawler.
Meta crawlers may cache robots.txt for up to 24 hours.
Meta-ExternalAds user agent
Meta documents these user agents for Meta-ExternalAds. Version numbers in it change over time, so match on the name, not the whole string.
meta-externalads/1.1 (+/documentation/sharing/webmasters/web-crawlers)
meta-externalads/1.1Should you block Meta-ExternalAds?
It depends on what it does; read the operator’s page below.
How to block Meta-ExternalAds in robots.txt
Add a group for its token to robots.txt at the root of your site.
A bot follows only the group that names it, so it ignores your User-agent: * rules once it has a group of its own. Repeat any paths you also want kept from it there.
User-agent: meta-externalads
Disallow: /How to verify a request is really Meta-ExternalAds
Anyone can send any user agent, so the string alone proves nothing.
Meta publishes no IP ranges or DNS names for Meta-ExternalAds that we could find, so there is no reliable way to tell a real Meta-ExternalAds from a scraper using its user agent.
See when Meta-ExternalAds reads your site
Bots don’t run JavaScript analytics, so a script tag never sees them. invisit records crawler reads on the server instead, through its server SDK or a Cloudflare Worker, and shows which bots read which pages, next to your visitors.
Checked against Meta’s own documentation on . Something changed? Write to help@invisit.dev.