Meta-ExternalHit
Meta platform bot fetching link previews and metadata for sharing
About this crawler
Meta-ExternalHit is a web crawler identified by the regular-expression pattern Meta-ExternalHit\/ in the User-Agent request header. It is categorised as social-preview. Use the regex above to detect, log, allow, or block Meta-ExternalHit traffic in your web server, CDN edge rules, or robots.txt.
Block-rate · top 25k sites
No block-rate data for this crawler.
Technical details
- Name
- Meta-ExternalHit
- Pattern
Meta-ExternalHit\/- Tags
- social-preview
- Reference
- https://datadome.co/bots/meta-externalagent/
- Added
- 2026/04/17
- Instances
- 1 known sample(s)
Sample User-Agent strings
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Meta-ExternalHit/1.1; +http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php)
Block this crawler
robots.txt — disallow Meta-ExternalHit:
User-agent: Meta-ExternalHit
Disallow: /
Apache .htaccess — return 403:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Meta-ExternalHit\/ [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
Nginx — return 403 inside a server block:
if ($http_user_agent ~* "Meta-ExternalHit\\/") {
return 403;
}
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