Meta-ExternalAds: user agent, purpose, and whether to allow it
Meta-ExternalAds crawls pages connected to Meta advertising, to check and rank ad content.
Specification
| Operator | Meta |
|---|---|
| Purpose | Ads verificationVisits pages submitted as advertisements to check them against policy. Only visits submitted pages. |
| Agent kind | CrawlerAutonomous crawler. Appears in your logs under its own user-agent. |
| User agent | meta-externalads/1.1 (+/documentation/sharing/webmasters/web-crawlers) |
| robots.txt token | meta-externalads |
| robots.txt compliance | Documented: respects robots.txt |
| Verification | No published method, user agent is the only signal |
| Sends referral traffic | No |
| Attaches a citation | No |
| Status | Active |
| Legacy Kymo category | other |
| Source | Operator documentationhttps://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/web-crawlers |
| Verified on |
What blocking it costs you
Only relevant if you advertise on Meta platforms. Blocking it may affect how your landing pages are assessed. It has no effect on organic reach or on Meta AI training.
robots.txt directives
Both blocks below address Meta-ExternalAds only. Rules for one token never apply to another, even from the same operator.
Allow Meta-ExternalAds
User-agent: meta-externalads Allow: /
Block Meta-ExternalAds
User-agent: meta-externalads Disallow: /
Questions
What is the Meta-ExternalAds user agent?
meta-externalads/1.1 (+/documentation/sharing/webmasters/web-crawlers)
Does Meta-ExternalAds respect robots.txt?
Documented: respects robots.txt
What does blocking Meta-ExternalAds cost me?
Only relevant if you advertise on Meta platforms. Blocking it may affect how your landing pages are assessed. It has no effect on organic reach or on Meta AI training.
Related crawlers
All AI crawlers and control tokens
See this bot in your own logs
Kymo classifies every crawler hit server-side using this registry, so Meta-ExternalAds shows up under Meta with its purpose attached. Read how crawler detection works, or run a free free AI visibility check to see what each crawler currently gets back from your server. No account needed for the check.