FacebookBot user agent
Operated by Meta
FacebookBot is an older Meta crawler that Meta described as collecting public pages to improve language models for speech recognition.
The FacebookBot bot at a glance
- FacebookBot is operated by Meta and collects public web pages that may be used to train AI models.
- The robots.txt token for FacebookBot is FacebookBot.
- Blocking an AI training crawler has no effect on Google or Bing rankings.
- FacebookBot robots.txt support: Yes.
- Recommendation for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): Your choice.
What is FacebookBot?
FacebookBot was documented by Meta for training speech recognition technology. Meta’s current crawler page lists Meta-ExternalAgent for AI training instead.
A FacebookBot rule is harmless to keep, but Meta-ExternalAgent is the token that controls Meta AI training today.
Should you block FacebookBot?
Blocking FacebookBot is a business decision: it protects your content but can lower how well AI products know your brand.
| Effect on search rankings | Blocking an AI training crawler has no effect on Google or Bing rankings. |
|---|---|
| Effect on AI visibility | Blocking keeps your future pages out of that company's training data, so its models may know less about your brand over time. It does not remove you from that company's AI search, which uses a separate bot. |
| Follows robots.txt | Yes |
| Recommendation | Your choice |
How to block or allow FacebookBot
Put the robots.txt rule in the file at the root of every domain and subdomain, for example https://example.com/robots.txt. The token FacebookBot is matched case-insensitively.
robots.txt: block
# Block FacebookBot
User-agent: FacebookBot
Disallow: /robots.txt: allow
# Allow FacebookBot
User-agent: FacebookBot
Allow: /robots.txt: partial
# Keep FacebookBot out of private areas only
User-agent: FacebookBot
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /my-account/
Allow: /Nginx
# Nginx: return 403 to FacebookBot
if ($http_user_agent ~* "(FacebookBot)") {
return 403;
}Apache
# Apache .htaccess: return 403 to FacebookBot
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (FacebookBot) [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]Cloudflare WAF
# Cloudflare > Security > WAF > Custom rule, action: Block
(http.user_agent contains "FacebookBot")How to verify real FacebookBot traffic
Meta publishes no IP list or reverse DNS pattern for FacebookBot, so the user agent cannot be verified. Anyone can send the same string. Rate-limit unusual volume instead of trusting the name.
How to find FacebookBot in your server logs
Search the web server access log for the token. The command below counts FacebookBot requests per URL on Nginx or Apache.
grep -i "FacebookBot" access.log | awk '{print $7}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -20For a full report per AI bot, upload the log to the AI Log File Analyzer, a free tool by Justin Hà.
FacebookBot FAQ
FacebookBot uses the robots.txt token "FacebookBot". Meta does not publish a full user-agent string, so match the token inside the User-Agent header.
Yes. Meta states that FacebookBot follows robots.txt rules written for the "FacebookBot" token.
Blocking an AI training crawler has no effect on Google or Bing rankings. Blocking keeps your future pages out of that company's training data, so its models may know less about your brand over time. It does not remove you from that company's AI search, which uses a separate bot.
Add two lines to the robots.txt file at the root of each domain and subdomain: "User-agent: FacebookBot" followed by "Disallow: /". The token is case-insensitive. Changes can take up to 24 hours to be picked up.
Not reliably. Meta publishes no IP list or reverse DNS pattern for FacebookBot, so anyone can send the same user agent. Rate-limit unusual volume instead of trusting the name.
Search your server access log for "FacebookBot", for example with: grep -i "FacebookBot" access.log. The AI Log File Analyzer by Justin Hà counts visits per AI bot from an uploaded log file.
Sources: Public bot registry. Last reviewed by Justin Hà.
See which of these bots actually reach your website
The AI Log File Analyzer by Justin Hà counts visits from GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and other AI crawlers in your server log, for free. The GEO Technical Package sets up robots.txt, llms.txt and crawler access for AI search.
