AI crawler · Meta · Ads checks and site-owner services
Meta-ExternalAds: what it is, its user agent, and how to block it
Meta-ExternalAds is Meta's service crawler. Crawls for advertising and other business products. In our 13 October 2026 study, 90 of 2,332 live top sites with readable robots.txt rules (3.9%) disallow Meta-ExternalAds. Part of the AI crawler list.
What Meta-ExternalAds does
Operator: Meta. Job: Ads checks and site-owner services. Obeys robots.txt.
“By configuring the robots.txt file on your website, you can specify to the Meta web crawlers how you would prefer them to interact with your site. In order to block these crawlers, add a disallow for the relevant crawler to robots.txt.”
Meta-ExternalAds user agent
robots.txt token: Meta-ExternalAds (matched case-insensitively).
meta-externalads/1.1 (+/documentation/sharing/webmasters/web-crawlers)meta-externalads/1.1Meta says the string in your logs will be similar to one of these.
robots.txt: allow or block Meta-ExternalAds
Allow
User-agent: Meta-ExternalAds
Allow: /Block
User-agent: Meta-ExternalAds
Disallow: /Training only, not citations. Blocking it has no effect on AI answers or search citations.
Once a group names Meta-ExternalAds, it ignores your User-agent: * rules, so copy any paths you still want blocked into it.
How many top sites block Meta-ExternalAds
Disallow Meta-ExternalAds in robots.txt
3.9%
90 of 2,332 sites
In our 13 October 2026 study, 90 of 2,332 live top sites with readable robots.txt rules (3.9%) disallow Meta-ExternalAds.
Sample: Tranco top 5,000, tested once on 13 October 2026 from one Indian fixed-line connection. The robots.txt share counts live sites (home page 2xx) whose rules we could read, as on the AI visibility hub. Method and CSV in the study.
Check your own site
The AI crawler checker reads your robots.txt the way Meta-ExternalAds does and tests what your firewall returns. To write the rules, use the AI robots.txt generator.
Check your page: free, about 20 seconds, no sign-in
What it checks
- robots.txt for Meta-ExternalAds
- Finds the group Meta-ExternalAds obeys under RFC 9309 and the rule that decides your page.
- What your CDN lets through
- Requests the page as OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot and compares the answers with a browser request.
- Content without JavaScript
- AI crawlers don't run JavaScript. The audit checks how much of the page is in the raw HTML.
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Questions
What is Meta-ExternalAds?+
Meta-ExternalAds is Meta's service crawler. Crawls for advertising and other business products.
What is Meta-ExternalAds's user agent?+
Meta documents it as: meta-externalads/1.1 (+/documentation/sharing/webmasters/web-crawlers). Match on the token Meta-ExternalAds, since version numbers change.
How do I block Meta-ExternalAds?+
Add "User-agent: Meta-ExternalAds" followed by "Disallow: /" to your robots.txt. Obeys robots.txt, per Meta.
Does blocking Meta-ExternalAds affect AI search citations?+
Blocking it has no effect on AI answers or search citations.
How many websites block Meta-ExternalAds?+
In our 13 October 2026 study, 90 of 2,332 live top sites with readable robots.txt rules (3.9%) disallow Meta-ExternalAds.