facebookexternalhit
Fetches a page's Open Graph tags to render the preview card when someone shares your URL on Facebook, Messenger, or Instagram.
| robots.txt token | facebookexternalhit |
| Respects robots.txt | Treats shares as user-triggered fetches |
| Verification | Meta publishes crawler IP ranges (AS32934) |
| Our recommendation | Allow — Blocking it breaks your own share cards — you'd be sabotaging your distribution. |
Block facebookexternalhit with robots.txt
User-agent: facebookexternalhit
Disallow: /robots.txt is a request, not a wall — requests claiming to be facebookexternalhit from unverified networks should be treated as bad bots. How to verify crawlers by network →
See every facebookexternalhit request hitting your site — live, with per-bot allow / block / tarpit controls. Try TrafficDATA free (100K page views)