What is meta-webindexer?
meta-webindexer is Meta's web crawler that browses the internet to improve search results for Meta AI users. It analyzes online content to make Meta AI's responses more relevant and accurate, allowing proper citation and linking back to source content. Agent Analytics can track when it visits your website.
Overview
| Operated By | Meta |
| Source | Official Website |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | Yes |
| Insights Last Updated | August 11, 2026 |
Do you operate this agent? Contact us to suggest an update.
Category
Expected Behavior
meta-webindexer revisits your site on a flexible schedule, often requesting several pages in a burst. Activity usually increases when your content changes or its index refreshes, with quiet intervals between crawl passes.
meta-webindexer's User Agent
| User Agent | Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/145.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 (compatible; meta-webindexer/1.1 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler)) |
How To Block meta-webindexer With Robots.txt
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block meta-webindexer from accessing your entire website, or use Automatic Robots.txt to block all AI search crawlers at once. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: meta-webindexer # https://knownagents.com/agents/meta-webindexer
Disallow: /Global Statistics for meta-webindexer
As of August 11, 2026, this data reflects agent visits measured across thousands of websites using Agent Analytics, combined with daily scans of the top 1000 websites and their robots.txt files.
Robots.txt Blocked Percentage
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocking Trend
4% of top websites block meta-webindexer in their robots.txt files.
Overall AI Search Crawler Traffic
1.9% of all web traffic came from AI search crawlers.
Top Visited Website Categories
The types of websites most frequently visited by meta-webindexer.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block meta-webindexer?
Usually not. Blocking meta-webindexer keeps your pages out of its AI search results and can eliminate referral traffic from that channel. It does not improve traditional search rankings. For context, 4% of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for meta-webindexer.
Does meta-webindexer Follow Robots.txt Rules?
Yes. meta-webindexer is expected to follow robots.txt directives, so a disallow rule is the appropriate first step. Automatic Robots.txt can add and maintain that rule, while Agent Analytics lets you verify whether meta-webindexer respects it.
Does meta-webindexer Access Private Content?
No special access. meta-webindexer can reach only content available to anonymous visitors. Make sure staging sites and other sensitive areas require authentication.
Why Is meta-webindexer Visiting My Website?
meta-webindexer is updating an AI search index so your pages can appear in its results. It may have discovered your site through links, a sitemap, or mentions of your domain.
How Can I Tell if meta-webindexer Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks visits from meta-webindexer and every other known AI agent, crawler, and scraper, then authenticates each visit using meta-webindexer's published verification method. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user-agent string contains "meta-webindexer". Look for bursts that follow links across several pages and recur over time. A matching log entry alone is not proof because any bot can claim to be meta-webindexer.