Facebot user agent
Operated by Meta
Facebot is an older Meta crawler user agent once used alongside FacebookExternalHit.
The Facebot bot at a glance
- Facebot is operated by Meta and reads page titles, descriptions and images to build link previews.
- The robots.txt token for Facebot is Facebot.
- Blocking a social preview bot has no effect on search rankings.
- Facebot robots.txt support: Not documented.
- Recommendation for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): Allow.
What is Facebot?
Facebot appeared in Meta’s earlier sharing documentation. Meta’s current crawler page lists FacebookExternalHit for link previews instead.
Keeping a Facebot rule is harmless; FacebookExternalHit is the token that matters for previews today.
Should you block Facebot?
Allow Facebot unless it causes a measurable load problem.
| Effect on search rankings | Blocking a social preview bot has no effect on search rankings. |
|---|---|
| Effect on AI visibility | No direct effect on AI answers, but shared links lose their title, image and description, which usually lowers clicks from social and chat apps. |
| Follows robots.txt | Not documented |
| Recommendation | Allow |
How to block or allow Facebot
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 Facebot is matched case-insensitively. robots.txt alone may not stop Facebot, so add the Nginx, Apache or Cloudflare rule as well.
robots.txt: block
# Block Facebot
User-agent: Facebot
Disallow: /robots.txt: allow
# Allow Facebot
User-agent: Facebot
Allow: /robots.txt: partial
# Keep Facebot out of private areas only
User-agent: Facebot
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /my-account/
Allow: /Nginx
# Nginx: return 403 to Facebot
if ($http_user_agent ~* "(Facebot)") {
return 403;
}Apache
# Apache .htaccess: return 403 to Facebot
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Facebot) [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]Cloudflare WAF
# Cloudflare > Security > WAF > Custom rule, action: Block
(http.user_agent contains "Facebot")How to verify real Facebot traffic
Meta publishes no IP list or reverse DNS pattern for Facebot, 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 Facebot in your server logs
Search the web server access log for the token. The command below counts Facebot requests per URL on Nginx or Apache.
grep -i "Facebot" 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.
Facebot user agent string
The full user agent Meta publishes for Facebot. Version numbers such as Chrome/W.X.Y.Z change over time, so match the token, not the whole string.
Facebot/1.0Facebot FAQ
Facebot identifies itself with the robots.txt token "Facebot". A typical request header reads: Facebot/1.0
Meta has not documented how Facebot treats robots.txt. Add a robots.txt rule and back it with a server rule if the traffic matters to you.
Blocking a social preview bot has no effect on search rankings. No direct effect on AI answers, but shared links lose their title, image and description, which usually lowers clicks from social and chat apps.
Add two lines to the robots.txt file at the root of each domain and subdomain: "User-agent: Facebot" 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 Facebot, so anyone can send the same user agent. Rate-limit unusual volume instead of trusting the name.
Search your server access log for "Facebot", for example with: grep -i "Facebot" 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.
