Does FacebookBot respect robots.txt?

Yes. The operator documents that FacebookBot reads robots.txt and follows Disallow rules for its own token. Rules take effect on the next fetch of the file, which can be hours or days after you publish them.

How do I verify a request really came from FacebookBot?

Check the source IP against AS32934. Meta publishes no per-bot range file. The reference is published at https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/web-crawlers/.

How do I block FacebookBot?

Add the FacebookBot token to robots.txt with Disallow: /. If the crawler ignores robots.txt, match the user agent at your CDN or reverse proxy and return 403 there instead.

IPScanner

Training crawlers

FacebookBot

FacebookBot is a bot operated by Meta/Facebook that collects pages used to train AI models. Officially used for training Meta "speech recognition technology," unknown if used to train Meta AI specifically. It honours robots.txt, and a request claiming to be FacebookBot can be checked against the operator's announced ASN.

FacebookBot at a glance

Reference data for the FacebookBot crawler
User agent	`FacebookBot` Token only. The operator has not published a full user-agent string, so match on the substring rather than an exact header.
Operator	Meta/Facebook
Purpose	Training language models
Respects robots.txt	Yes, documentedsource
Verification method	Operator ASN check Check the source IP against AS32934. Meta publishes no per-bot range file. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/web-crawlers/
Crawl pattern	Up to 1 page per second
Robots.txt tokens	`FacebookBot`
Operator documentation	https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/web-crawlers/

Officially used for training Meta "speech recognition technology," unknown if used to train Meta AI specifically.

robots.txt

Allow or block FacebookBot

Paste one of these into the robots.txt file at the root of your domain. Rules are per token, so a block on one crawler leaves every other bot untouched.

Block FacebookBot

User-agent: FacebookBot
Disallow: /

Blocks every path for this crawler only.

Allow FacebookBot

User-agent: FacebookBot
Allow: /

Explicit allow. Useful when a wildcard rule above it would otherwise catch this crawler.

Allow, except the pages you never want quoted

User-agent: FacebookBot
Allow: /
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /search

Edit the Disallow paths to match your own account, checkout and search URLs.

What blocking actually costs you

Blocking FacebookBot keeps your pages out of the next training run. It does not remove anything already collected, and it has no effect on how the site ranks in ordinary search.

Block every crawler in the directory at once

Verification

Is that really FacebookBot?

A user-agent header is a string the client chooses. Scrapers copy FacebookBot precisely because site owners allow it. Check the source IP against AS32934. Meta publishes no per-bot range file.

Paste the IP address from your access log below. You will see whether it belongs to a hosting provider, a residential proxy pool or a Tor exit, plus the ASN that announces it, which is what tells you whether the claim holds up.

Datacenter IP detectionNearly every real AI crawler egresses from cloud ranges. A residential IP claiming to be one is the first thing to check.IP reputation checkSee whether the address behind a fake crawler hit has a history of abuse elsewhere.Residential proxy detectionScrapers that get blocked by user agent often come back through residential proxy pools.

Other crawlers run by Meta/Facebook

facebookexternalhitOther automated crawlers

Related crawlers

facebookexternalhitMeta/Facebook · Other automated crawlers anthropic-aiAnthropic · Training crawlers Applebot-ExtendedApple · Training crawlers ClaudeBotAnthropic · Training crawlers Google-ExtendedGoogle · Training crawlers

Agentscan

Identify crawlers automatically instead of by hand

Agentscan checks a request against published crawler ranges, reverse DNS and hosting data, then returns a verdict your edge can act on. One call per request, no range files to keep up to date.

How Agentscan works API reference Pricing What is my IP

FAQ