--- title: "What is facebookexternalhit? Meta's Bot Explained | Kitbase" description: "facebookexternalhit is an AI-related crawler operated by Meta. How to identify and verify it, and what its traffic means for your site." canonical: https://kitbase.dev/bot-directory/facebookexternalhit --- [Home](/) [Bot Directory](/bot-directory) facebookexternalhit # facebookexternalhit by Meta Social preview UA + IP range Fetches a page to build the link preview card shown when someone shares it. facebookexternalhit is an AI-related crawler operated by Meta. ## What it usually means Meta crawled this page as part of its AI crawling. ## How to identify it User-Agent tokens `facebookexternalhit` robots.txt stanza `User-agent: facebookexternalhit` Free tools [Verify a facebookexternalhit request](/tools/bot-verifier?ua=facebookexternalhit) [Check if your site allows facebookexternalhit](/tools/ai-crawler-access-checker) ## How it's verified Published IP-range endpoints - [https://stat.ripe.net/data/announced-prefixes/data.json?resource=AS32934](https://stat.ripe.net/data/announced-prefixes/data.json?resource=AS32934) Currently loaded ranges (sample) Refreshed Sep 4, 2026 `163.77.136.0/23``2a03:2880:f37a::/48``185.60.217.0/24``157.240.14.0/24``2a03:2880:f366::/48``2a03:2880:f085::/48``57.145.6.0/23``57.145.16.0/23``57.141.4.0/24``57.144.186.0/23` 1 IP source configured [Meta's page for facebookexternalhit](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/web-crawlers/) ## Sources - [Meta crawler docs](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/web-crawlers/) ## More from Meta [ meta-externalfetcher Meta fetcher used when a person requests or shares a specific URL. ](/bot-directory/meta-externalfetcher)[ meta-externalagent Meta crawler collecting public content to train its AI models and improve Meta products. ](/bot-directory/meta-externalagent)[ meta-externalads meta-externalads is an AI-related crawler operated by Meta. ](/bot-directory/meta-externalads)[ meta-webindexer Meta crawler used to improve Meta AI search result quality. ](/bot-directory/meta-webindexer)[ FacebookBot FacebookBot is an AI-related crawler operated by Meta. ](/bot-directory/facebookbot) ## See if facebookexternalhit has visited your site Kitbase verifies and tracks bot and AI crawler traffic separately from human visitors, so you know exactly who's hitting your site. [Start Free Trial](https://app.kitbase.dev/signup)