FacebookBot: Meta's Training Crawler
What is FacebookBot?
FacebookBot is a Meta crawler distinct from facebookexternalhit, historically associated with speech and language model training. FacebookBot is separate from facebookexternalhit and from meta-externalagent, and each Meta token has to be named in robots.txt on its own.
Key facts
- FacebookBot is operated by Meta, and its purpose is training: collects content that may be used to train future models.
- Meta publishes no full user-agent string for FacebookBot, so Kymo matches the token FacebookBot observed in real logs.
- The robots.txt token for FacebookBot is FacebookBot, and Meta publishes no compliance statement for FacebookBot.
- FacebookBot never sends a visitor to your site, and FacebookBot attaches no citation when it uses your content.
Specification
| Operator | Meta |
|---|---|
| Purpose | TrainingCollects content that may be used to train future models. Blocking it removes your content from future training runs. It does not affect whether a model can find and cite you today. |
| Agent kind | CrawlerAutonomous crawler. Appears in your logs under its own user-agent. |
| User agent | Not documented by Meta. Kymo matches this agent on the token FacebookBot, observed in real logs rather than published in operator documentation. |
| robots.txt token | FacebookBot |
| robots.txt compliance | No operator statement located |
| Verification | No published method, user agent is the only signal |
| Sends referral traffic | No |
| Attaches a citation | No |
| Status | Active |
| Legacy Kymo category | training |
| Source | Observed in real logs, no operator documentation locatedMeta publishes no crawler documentation that Kymo could locate. Everything on this page comes from observed traffic, not from a vendor page. |
| Verified on |
What this looks like in your logs
grep -i 'FacebookBot' access.log
Meta publishes no full user-agent string for FacebookBot, so the rest of the line varies and only the token FacebookBot is dependable. Kymo matches on that token, case-insensitively, for the same reason.
What FacebookBot does not do
FacebookBot does not send you a visitor, and it attaches no citation, so a read by it can never turn into a click.
FacebookBot does not decide whether Meta can find you today, because a training run happens long before any question is asked.
Meta publishes no documentation for FacebookBot at all, so no crawl frequency and no compliance statement exists to quote.
How Kymo classifies it
Kymo files FacebookBot under Meta as training, classified from the HTTP request on the server rather than from anything running in a browser.
A hit from FacebookBot appears on the Crawlers dashboard and is deliberately left out of the AI Visibility numbers. A training run sends nobody, so a read by it has no click to compare against.
Allow it or block it
Blocking FacebookBot does not affect link previews, which are handled by facebookexternalhit, and does not affect meta-externalagent. Each Meta token must be addressed separately.
| Allow it if | Block it if |
|---|---|
| You want your content represented in future Meta models, and you accept that a training run sends no visitor and no link back. | You sell access to your content, or you object to it being used as training data without payment or credit. |
robots.txt directives
Both blocks below address FacebookBot only. Rules for one token never apply to another, even from the same operator.
Allow FacebookBot
User-agent: FacebookBot Allow: /
Block FacebookBot
User-agent: FacebookBot Disallow: /
Questions
How do I know a request claiming to be FacebookBot is genuine?
Meta publishes no verification method for FacebookBot, so the user-agent string is the only signal available, and anyone can send one. Treat a claimed FacebookBot request as unproven.
Does blocking FacebookBot also block meta-externalagent?
No. FacebookBot and meta-externalagent are separate tokens, and Meta treats each one on its own. A rule naming FacebookBot leaves meta-externalagent free to carry on collecting your content for Meta model training. To stop that as well, name meta-externalagent in a rule of its own.
Will I see FacebookBot in Google Analytics?
No. Google Analytics runs a JavaScript tag in a visitor's browser, and FacebookBot reads your HTML and leaves without running any script. Server-side logging is the only way to record it.
Does FacebookBot send traffic back to my site?
No. FacebookBot takes content and sends nothing back. A hit appears in your logs as a request with no visitor behind it.
Related crawlers
All AI crawlers and control tokens
See this bot in your own logs
FacebookBot takes your content and sends nothing back, so it leaves no trace at all in a browser-based analytics tool.
Kymo reads the HTTP request on your server, so a crawler that never runs JavaScript is still recorded. You see which bots reached the site, which pages they took and how often, next to your human traffic.
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