Purpose: Training. Bulk crawling to build model training data.
Meta's crawler, collecting web content to train its models.
11.76%
of the panel names this token in robots.txt and disallows it, for the week of 2026-10-05.
How sites treat this token
| Stance | Domains | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| FullBlock | 99 | Every path is disallowed for this token. |
| PartialBlock | 18 | Some paths are disallowed for this token; others are not. |
| Allowed | 7 | The token is named and explicitly allowed. |
| Unmentioned | 871 | The file never names this token. This is not consent โ the site may still close it off with a blanket rule for every crawler. |
meta-externalagent's three-year history
A site in the historical panel first named and disallowed this token in 2024-08; its most recent reading is 14.06%.
Meta's other tokens
Publishes separate tokens for training, user-initiated fetches and indexing.
| Token | Purpose | Published rate |
|---|---|---|
| meta-externalfetcher | User-initiated | 6.53% |
| meta-webindexer | Search | 3.32% |
Sites that treat these tokens differently
105 domains in the panel treat Meta's tokens differently from one another. The first 25 are shown below.
| Domain | meta-externalagent | meta-externalfetcher | meta-webindexer |
|---|---|---|---|
| abc.net.au | FullBlock | Unmentioned | Unmentioned |
| ad.nl | Unmentioned | FullBlock | Unmentioned |
| aftonbladet.se | FullBlock | Unmentioned | Unmentioned |
| airbnb.com | PartialBlock | Unmentioned | Unmentioned |
| amap.com | PartialBlock | Unmentioned | Unmentioned |
| amplitude.com | PartialBlock | Unmentioned | Unmentioned |
| bandcamp.com | FullBlock | Unmentioned | Unmentioned |
| bbc.co.uk | FullBlock | Unmentioned | Unmentioned |
| bbc.com | FullBlock | Unmentioned | Unmentioned |
| behance.net | FullBlock | Unmentioned | Unmentioned |
| bloomberg.com | FullBlock | FullBlock | Unmentioned |
| buzzfeed.com | FullBlock | FullBlock | Unmentioned |
| canva.com | FullBlock | Unmentioned | Unmentioned |
| capcut.com | Unmentioned | PartialBlock | PartialBlock |
| cnbc.com | FullBlock | Unmentioned | Unmentioned |
| cookpad.com | FullBlock | Unmentioned | Unmentioned |
| corriere.it | FullBlock | Unmentioned | Unmentioned |
| coursera.org | FullBlock | Unmentioned | Unmentioned |
| dagbladet.no | FullBlock | Unmentioned | Unmentioned |
| dailymail.co.uk | FullBlock | FullBlock | Unmentioned |
| dailymail.com | FullBlock | FullBlock | Unmentioned |
| dcinside.com | FullBlock | Unmentioned | Unmentioned |
| disneyplus.com | PartialBlock | PartialBlock | Unmentioned |
| doctolib.fr | PartialBlock | Unmentioned | Unmentioned |
| dw.com | FullBlock | FullBlock | Unmentioned |