Facebot

social-preview Facebot

Facebook's web crawler for social sharing

About this crawler

Facebot is a web crawler identified by the regular-expression pattern Facebot in the User-Agent request header. It is categorised as social-preview. Use the regex above to detect, log, allow, or block Facebot traffic in your web server, CDN edge rules, or robots.txt.

Block-rate · top 25k sites

0.20%
latest snapshot
2026-06-04
matched key: Facebot
2026-05-012026-06-040.28%

Technical details

Name
Facebot
Pattern
Facebot
Tags
social-preview
Reference
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/best-practices#crawl
Added
2014/12/30
Instances
1 known sample(s)

Sample User-Agent strings

Facebot/1.0

Block this crawler

robots.txt — disallow Facebot:

User-agent: Facebot Disallow: /

Apache .htaccess — return 403:

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Facebot [NC] RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

Nginx — return 403 inside a server block:

if ($http_user_agent ~* "Facebot") { return 403; }
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