# Meta-ExternalAds

## Quick answer

Meta-ExternalAds is a Meta crawler used for advertising and other business-related product improvements. It is a separate robots.txt token from the link-preview crawler, FacebookExternalHit, and from Meta's AI-training and agentic fetching crawlers, each one controlled fully on its own terms.

## What it does

Meta-ExternalAds crawls publicly available web pages to support use cases tied to advertising and other business-related products and services Meta offers, rather than generating link previews or gathering AI training data, which are handled by other named Meta crawlers. Meta lists this as a distinct token in its crawler documentation specifically so site owners can control advertising-related crawling separately from, for example, FacebookExternalHit's link preview fetches or its AI-focused bots. Meta-ExternalAds respects robots.txt, so standard disallow and allow directives apply to it like most compliant crawlers. There is no published IP range list for this specific bot in Meta's documentation, so verifying its traffic independently is harder than with crawlers that publish a dedicated range.

## Facts

- Operator: Meta
- Robots token: meta-externalads
- User agent string(s): meta-externalads/1.1 (+/documentation/sharing/webmasters/web-crawlers); meta-externalads/1.1
- Purpose: other
- Respects robots.txt: yes

## Should you block it?

Blocking Meta-ExternalAds mainly affects how Meta's advertising and related business products use content from a site, rather than touching social share previews or Meta's AI training pipelines, which run through separate crawler tokens. A business that advertises on Meta's platforms or relies on Meta's ad tools to understand its own site may want to leave this crawler allowed so those tools work as expected. A publisher with no advertising relationship to Meta, or one specifically concerned about this category of data use, can disallow it without affecting whether its links preview correctly when shared, since that depends on FacebookExternalHit instead. Because this bot respects robots.txt, a disallow rule should be reliable without needing a separate verification step.

## How to block it

Add this to robots.txt to block Meta-ExternalAds:

User-agent: meta-externalads
Disallow: /

This rule only affects the advertising-related crawler; it does not change how FacebookExternalHit generates link previews or how Meta's other named crawlers behave.

## FAQ

### What does Meta-ExternalAds crawl for?

Meta says this crawler supports use cases such as improving advertising and other business-related products and services.

### Is Meta-ExternalAds the same as the link preview crawler?

No. Link previews are handled by FacebookExternalHit, a separate, independently controlled crawler token.

### Does Meta-ExternalAds respect robots.txt?

Yes, based on Meta's published crawler documentation for this token.

## Sources

- Meta-ExternalAds crawls the web for use cases such as improving advertising and other business-related products. Source: https://developers.facebook.com/documentation/sharing/webmasters/web-crawlers