Meta-ExternalFetcher
by Meta
AI answers · User-triggered
Fetches individual links on behalf of users of Meta AI products, e.g. when a link is shared.
An assistant fetches your page live because a person asked a question. These visits can turn into real traffic through citations.
Control it with robots.txt
Well-behaved crawlers read robots.txt before crawling. To block Meta-ExternalFetcher on your whole site:
robots.txt
User-agent: Meta-ExternalFetcher Disallow: /
Blocking AI search and answer crawlers can also remove your pages from AI answers and citations. Weigh traffic from AI assistants before blocking them.