FacebookBot
Meta's current crawler page does not list it. Community lists say it gathered data for Meta's speech-recognition work. Kept so a robots.txt that names it is read correctly; it is not scored.
Where this comes from
- Community-listed; no vendor documentation. Source: developers.facebook.com
- Honours robots.txt.
- Listed, not scored. It cannot keep a site out of today's answers, so the check shows a block without deducting for it.
In the top 1,000 websites
- 13.4% block it in robots.txt (76 of the 569 sites with a robots.txt), as of 2026-10-12.
- Method, limits and the full data: the October 2026 study of the top 1,000 websites.
What blocking it costs
Nothing in today's answers, and nothing in the readiness score: FacebookBot only gathers training data, so blocking it is a policy choice about future models, not about being found. The check lists the block without deducting for it.
The robots.txt lines
To let it in (a group that names the crawler replaces any wildcard rules for it, so this also lifts a User-agent: * block):
User-agent: FacebookBot
Allow: /To keep it out:
User-agent: FacebookBot
Disallow: /A rule in robots.txt is a request. Meta AI says this crawler honours it. The robots.txt generator writes a whole file with the same split: block the training crawlers, keep the search and answer crawlers.
Also from Meta AI
meta-externalagent· AI answersmeta-externalfetcher· Fetches when a user asks
Does FacebookBot get through on your site?
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