AI search & answer engines
Meta-ExternalFetcher
Fetches individual links at a user's request, including for agentic AI tasks in Meta AI products.
Dossier
- Operator
- Meta
- Documentation
- developers.facebook.com
- robots.txt token
meta-externalfetcher- Feeds
- live answer fetch
- Follows robots.txt
- No, per its documentationDocs: because fetches are user-initiated, this crawler may bypass robots.txt rules.
- How to verify
- No published method
- Names in our logs
meta-externalfetcher- Researched
- 23 Oct 2026
Observed on New Runtime
Baseline 2026-10-23 · 93-day window · loading live numbers…
- Requests
- 2
- Days active
- 1 / 93
- First seen
- 21 Oct 2026
- Last seen
- 21 Oct 2026
New this weekai_user_agent
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