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meta-externalads

Crawls the web to improve advertising and business-related products and services.
meta-externalads
Advertising

What is meta-externalads?

meta-externalads is an advertising crawler. Crawls the web to improve advertising and business-related products and services.

meta-externalads is an operational bot rather than an AI crawler, so it does not directly affect whether you appear in AI answers. It still shows up in your logs, and bots like it help keep your site healthy and crawlable, which indirectly supports both SEO and AI visibility.

Like any automated client, meta-externalads consumes crawl budget and appears in your server and CDN logs. Reviewing those logs alongside your robots.txt rules helps you keep automated traffic deliberate and easy to reason about.

Want to see every AI bot hitting your site? Promptwatch turns your server and CDN logs into a live view of AI crawler and agent traffic, so you can watch ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and others crawl your pages and connect those visits to real citations and revenue. Learn more in AI crawler logs.

See every AI bot hitting your site

Promptwatch turns your server and CDN logs into a live view of AI crawler and agent traffic. Watch ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and more crawl your pages in real time, see exactly what they take, and connect every crawl to the citations and revenue it drives.

How to handle meta-externalads

Whether to allow meta-externalads depends on whether you rely on the service behind it. Use a robots.txt rule to allow or disallow it.

To control meta-externalads, add a rule for its user agent to your robots.txt:

User-agent: meta-externalads
Disallow: /

meta-externalads generally honors robots.txt directives.

Examples

  • A site owner spots meta-externalads in access logs and confirms it against the operator's documented user agent.
  • An operations team allows meta-externalads so the service it powers keeps working as expected.

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Frequently asked questions about meta-externalads

Learn about AI visibility monitoring and how Promptwatch helps your brand succeed in AI search.

meta-externalads is an advertising crawler; its operator is identified in its user-agent string and public documentation.

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