facebookexternalhit

Meta · Link preview fetchers · json

User-agent: facebookexternalhit
Disallow: /
robots.txt tokenfacebookexternalhit
User-agent containsfacebookexternalhit
OperatorMeta
CategoryLink preview fetchers
robots.txtobeys robots.txt (documented)
Verify byno published verification method

What it is

The link unfurler: it reads your Open Graph tags when somebody shares your URL on a Meta property.

What blocking it costs you

Severe and usually accidental. Your links share as bare grey boxes with no title, image or description across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. Almost nobody means to block this.

Full user-agent string

facebookexternalhit/1.1 (+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php)

Allow it instead

User-agent: facebookexternalhit
Allow: /

Operator documentation: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/web-crawlers
Machine copies: json · markdown
Policies that name this crawler: allow-all · allow-ai-search-only · maximum-ai-visibility