What is meta-externalads?
Meta assigns meta-externalads a specific business role: it crawls pages for advertising and other business-related products and services. The company lists it separately from the crawlers used for link previews and from Meta-ExternalAgent, which supports Meta's AI products.
Meta does not publish a detailed breakdown of what each visit is meant to evaluate. A hit may contribute to one of the documented advertising or business uses, but the user agent alone does not reveal which workflow caused the request.
In access logs, the crawler appears as meta-externalads/1.1, with some variants adding a link to Meta's crawler documentation. Meta lets site owners set rules for it in robots.txt. Those rules may be cached for as long as 24 hours, so traffic can continue for a while after a change.
There is no documented AI search or model-training use for meta-externalads. Allowing it gives Meta access for the stated advertising and business purposes only. It does not help a page appear in an AI answer, and blocking it does not create a rule for Meta-ExternalAgent.
