Meta-ExternalAgent explained: what it is and what to do

Meta-ExternalAgent is a bot user-agent string associated with Meta crawling activity. If you see it in logs, handle it with the same policy discipline as other AI/search crawlers: decide whether to allow it, align robots.txt and edge rules, and monitor status codes. Avoid blanket assumptions based on one string alone; verify current platform documentation and your own traffic patterns. Allowing a crawler does not guarantee citations or referral traffic.

When new user-agents appear, teams often react by blocking everything. A better approach is explicit policy by bot type, with logs to confirm intended behavior.