Meta-ExternalAgent is Meta's general-purpose AI training crawler. It indexes web content used to train Meta's foundation models (Llama family) and improve Meta AI features. Site owners can opt out via robots.txt; this is distinct from FacebookBot (speech-recognition) and Meta-ExternalFetcher (live user requests).

At a glance

Operator: Meta
Type: AI Training
RSL category: ai-train

How Centinel checks it

User agent: The request calls itself this crawler. Anyone can send the same string.
IP ranges: The operator publishes the addresses it crawls from, and Centinel checks the client address against that list.

A request that passes one of these checks is Meta-ExternalAgent itself. One that only matches the user agent is reported as unverified. The match tokens, verification domains, and address feeds are not published here.

Allowing or blocking it

The crawler object in the /validate response sets access_allowed to true only for a verified source that your tenant allowlists. A policy rule can allow or block this crawler by its category, AI Training.

Back to the crawler catalog