FacebookBot
Meta's older documented training crawler, collecting public content to improve its speech and language models.
Reference reviewed by Sona
| Operator | Meta |
|---|---|
| Powers | Meta speech and language model training |
| Purpose | Model training |
| User-agent token | FacebookBot |
| Respects robots.txt | Yes |
FacebookBot predates Meta's newer meta-externalagent token and crawls public web content to help train Meta's language technology, including speech recognition models.
Meta documents FacebookBot and states it respects robots.txt for its token. Note it is distinct from facebookexternalhit, the link-preview fetcher for shares - blocking FacebookBot does not break link previews.
Full user-agent string
FacebookBot/1.0 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/facebookbot/)
Allow FacebookBot
Your content can inform Meta's language and speech models alongside the newer Meta-ExternalAgent crawl.
User-agent: FacebookBot Allow: /
Block FacebookBot
Keep your content out of Meta's training pipeline - pair it with a meta-externalagent rule for full coverage.
User-agent: FacebookBot Disallow: /
Can FacebookBot read your page right now?
Test any URL and see exactly what AI crawlers receive.