facebo
Social Mediaby Meta
facebookexternalhit
Meta's bot that fetches Open Graph metadata when a URL is shared on Facebook or Instagram. It reads og:title, og:description, og:image and renders link preview cards. It does not respect robots.txt.
Respects robots.txt
No
Can be blocked
Partial
Crawl-Delay support
No
Type
Social Media
Purpose
Open Graph metadata scraping for Facebook/Instagram link previews
SEO Impact
Blocking this bot breaks Facebook and Instagram link previews, reducing click-through rates from social shares. Ensure og:image is accessible without auth for all public pages.
User-Agent String
facebookexternalhit/1.1
robots.txt Control
Cannot be blocked via robots.txt (does not respect it). Can be blocked via server firewall or Cloudflare rules, but this breaks link previews.
Block
User-agent: facebookexternalhit Disallow: /
Allow (default)
User-agent: facebookexternalhit Allow: /
Official Documentation
Test your robots.txt against facebookexternalhit
Check which paths are blocked or allowed for each user-agent