Link previewers
facebookexternalhit
Meta's fetcher that retrieves pages shared on Facebook, Instagram or Messenger to build and cache link previews (title, description, thumbnail).
Dossier
- Operator
- Meta
- Documentation
- developers.facebook.com
- robots.txt token
facebookexternalhit- Feeds
- link preview
- Follows robots.txt
- Partly, per its documentationDocs: may bypass robots.txt for security or integrity checks.
- How to verify
- Unknown
- Names in our logs
facebook external hitfacebookexternalhit- Researched
- 23 Oct 2026
Observed on New Runtime
Baseline 2026-10-23 · 93-day window · loading live numbers…
- Requests
- 1,538
- Days active
- 61 / 93
- First seen
- 24 Jul 2026
- Last seen
- 23 Oct 2026
Regularother_bot
Identity check claimed vs verified
- No per-family identity check is published for this reader; its name is a claim.
What it reads crawler journeys · current window
- The crawler-journeys aggregate tracks reading depth for the busiest named crawlers only; this family is not among them.
Enters at · 7 days
Leaves from · 7 days
Sources
- developers.facebook.comdevelopers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/web-crawlers/