{"schema_version":"newruntime-reader-dossiers-v1","type":"reader_dossier","id":"reader:facebookexternalhit","slug":"facebookexternalhit","name":"facebookexternalhit","kind":"link_preview","kind_label":"Link previewers","operator":{"name":"Meta","url":"https://www.meta.com/"},"docs_url":"https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/web-crawlers/","robots_tokens":["facebookexternalhit"],"purpose":"Meta's fetcher that retrieves pages shared on Facebook, Instagram or Messenger to build and cache link previews (title, description, thumbnail).","feeds":["link_preview"],"respects_robots":"documented_partial","robots_note":"Docs: may bypass robots.txt for security or integrity checks.","verification":{"method":"unknown","url":null},"why_it_matters":{"text":"Someone shared a New Runtime link on a Meta surface; a human distribution signal.","kind":"new_runtime_interpretation"},"confidence":"high","researched_at":"2026-10-23","sources":["https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/web-crawlers/"],"icon_url":"https://newruntime.com/readers/icons/facebook.png","matching":{"aliases":["facebook external hit","facebookexternalhit"],"rule":"Reduce each agent_days label to a token: for labels starting with Mozilla/ take the product after 'compatible;', else a versioned crawler token such as 'FooBot/1.0' (a truncated 'Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 7.0;) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile' prefix logged before 23 Oct 2026 is PetalBot; anything else is unidentified-android, unidentified-linux-chrome or unidentified-browser); otherwise take the text before the first '/', '(' or ';' and drop a trailing ' token probe'. Lowercase it. A dossier owns the tokens in its aliases."},"observed_baseline":{"as_of":"2026-10-23T08:01:01.990Z","window_first_day":"2026-07-23","window_last_day":"2026-10-23","observed_days":93,"note":"Refreshed daily in production from the live aggregates (dated by as_of). For current numbers aggregate live_sources.history agent_days by matching.aliases.","total_requests":1538,"first_seen":"2026-07-24T23:20:23.411Z","last_seen":"2026-10-23T07:55:39.680Z","days_active":61,"recency":"regular","categories":["other_bot"],"label_variants":1,"journeys":null},"identity_note":"A family name is what a client claims in its user agent. It is verified only when its request came from the operator's published IP ranges or passed forward-confirmed reverse DNS, as reported per family in /crawler-journeys.json. Anyone can claim any name.","privacy":{"scope":"family-level aggregates only","ip_addresses":"not_output","raw_user_agents":"not_output (labels are sanitized; URLs inside them are redacted)","visitor_ids":"not_output","query_strings":"not_output"},"live_sources":{"history":"https://newruntime.com/bot-traffic-history.json","latest":"https://newruntime.com/bot-traffic-latest.json","machine_consumption":"https://newruntime.com/machine-consumption.json","crawler_journeys":"https://newruntime.com/crawler-journeys.json"},"routes":{"html":"https://newruntime.com/readers/facebookexternalhit/","markdown":"https://newruntime.com/readers/facebookexternalhit.md","json":"https://newruntime.com/readers/facebookexternalhit.json","index":"https://newruntime.com/readers.json","index_html":"https://newruntime.com/readers/"}}