CrawlPactMeta-ExternalAds
- User-agent token
- Meta-ExternalAds
- Purpose
- Advertising / validation
- Status
- active
- Last verified
- 2026-07-24
Meta documents Meta-ExternalAds as a crawler used “for use cases such as improving advertising
and other business-related products” — an advertising/validation-purpose crawler, distinct from
Meta’s AI training and search crawlers.
A note on the token
Meta’s own documentation writes the literal user-agent string in lowercase,
meta-externalads/1.1. robots.txt user-agent matching is case-insensitive (RFC 9309 §2.2.1),
so this does not change how a Disallow rule applies.
Site-owner controls
Disallowing Meta-ExternalAds affects only Meta’s advertising- and business-product-related
crawling of this content. It does not affect Meta-ExternalAgent (AI training),
Meta-WebIndexer (search), or Meta-ExternalFetcher (user-triggered agent fetches) — Meta
documents each as a separate token, and CrawlPact evaluates them independently. See
/limitations for what a robots.txt rule can and cannot guarantee.
Example robots.txt configuration
To disallow Meta-ExternalAds specifically, without affecting any other crawler:
User-agent: Meta-ExternalAds
Disallow: /If no dedicated User-agent: Meta-ExternalAds group exists in a domain's robots.txt, this crawler falls back to whatever the wildcard User-agent: * group says (RFC 9309) — see robots.txt syntax basics for how group selection works.
Verified against the source above as of 2026-07-24 — see how CrawlPact verifies crawler information.
See how this applies to your own site
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