FacebookBot
Operator unconfirmed · Unconfirmed Not in Meta’s docs · robots.txt: Unconfirmed
Not in Meta’s current crawler documentation (checked 2026-09-24). A robots.txt line naming FacebookBot may do nothing: robots.txt only works through the names a crawler answers to, and Meta does not document this one.
Meta's current tokens: FacebookExternalHit, Meta-WebIndexer, Meta-ExternalAds, Meta-ExternalAgent and Meta-ExternalFetcher. Each one’s page says what it does and whether it follows robots.txt. Keeping the old line next to them costs nothing.
Every fact below is unconfirmed by the operator: Meta's documentation does not mention this token, so this page states nothing about what it does. The robots.txt lines below are still correct syntax for it.
Block FacebookBot
User-agent: FacebookBot
Disallow: /Unconfirmed by the operator No operator documentation says whether FacebookBot reads robots.txt at all, so these lines are a request it may or may not honour.
Allow FacebookBot
User-agent: FacebookBot
Allow: /An allow group only changes anything if a broader rule would block FacebookBot. Under the robots.txt standard (RFC 9309, section 2.2.1) a crawler follows the group that names it and uses the User-agent: * group only when no group does — so this group lets it in even if your * group says Disallow: /. Token matching is case-insensitive.
Put these lines in /robots.txt at the root of each host (each subdomain has its own file). robots.txt is a request to well-behaved crawlers, not access control.
Already have a robots.txt? Paste it into the robots.txt checker to see whether it blocks FacebookBot on a given path, and which line decides.
Facts
- Operator
- Unconfirmed by the operator Meta's current crawler documentation does not list this token.
- Purpose
- Unconfirmed by the operator
- Obeys robots.txt
- Unconfirmed by the operator
- In your server logs
- Unconfirmed by the operator The documentation we checked does not give its user-agent string.
- How to verify it
- Unconfirmed by the operator The documentation we checked gives no IP list or DNS check for this crawler, so a request claiming to be FacebookBot cannot be verified against the operator.
What Meta says
Quoted word for word from the operator's documentation.
“This page provides guidance on how to configure your robots.txt file so that our crawlers interact properly with your site.”
Sources
- Meta for Developers: Meta Web Crawlers — fetched and checked 2026-09-24
Where we looked
- developers.facebook.com/documentation/sharing/webmasters/web-crawlers — 2026-09-24: Loaded; lists FacebookExternalHit, Meta-WebIndexer, Meta-ExternalAds, Meta-ExternalAgent and Meta-ExternalFetcher. No mention of FacebookBot.