FacebookBot
Meta's AI speech recognition training crawler
About this crawler
FacebookBot is a web crawler identified by the regular-expression pattern FacebookBot in the User-Agent request header. It is categorised as ai-crawler. Use the regex above to detect, log, allow, or block FacebookBot traffic in your web server, CDN edge rules, or robots.txt.
Block-rate · top 25k sites
4.1%
Technical details
- Name
- FacebookBot
- Pattern
FacebookBot- Tags
- ai-crawler
- Reference
- https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/web-crawlers
- Added
- 2026/04/26
- rDNS suffixes
.facebook.com,.fbcdn.net,.fbsv.net,.tfbnw.net- Instances
- 1 known sample(s)
rDNS verification (FCrDNS)
Verify a request is genuinely FacebookBot with forward-confirmed reverse DNS: the client IP's PTR record must end in one of the suffixes below and a forward A/AAAA lookup of that hostname must return the same IP. UA strings alone are spoofable; FCrDNS is not.
.facebook.com.fbcdn.net.fbsv.net.tfbnw.net
Sample User-Agent strings
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; FacebookBot/1.0; +https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/facebookbot/)
Block this crawler
robots.txt — disallow FacebookBot:
User-agent: FacebookBot
Disallow: /
Apache .htaccess — return 403:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} FacebookBot [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
Nginx — return 403 inside a server block:
if ($http_user_agent ~* "FacebookBot") {
return 403;
}
← back to all crawlers