Kuldeep Paul

Model training · Meta

FacebookBot

An older Meta crawler documented for training speech-recognition and language models.

Compiled by · Updated Oct 29, 2026

10%of top sites fully block FacebookBot
570sites blocking, of 5,701 with robots.txt
78of the top 1,000 block it
Operator
Meta
Purpose
Model training
Used for
Meta speech and language models
Obeys robots.txt
Yes
robots.txt token
FacebookBot
User-agent string
Not published by the operator
IP list
Not published
Official docs
developers.facebook.com

Block FacebookBot in robots.txt

User-agent: FacebookBot
Disallow: /

Well-known sites that block FacebookBot

yahoo.com #72, vimeo.com #87, msn.com #92, chatgpt.com #112, snapchat.com #157, tumblr.com #160, nytimes.com #163, gravatar.com #165, cnn.com #195, theguardian.com #196, medium.com #198, forter.com #220, sciencedirect.com #224, weather.com #250, canva.com #276, launchpad.net #281, nature.com #297, espn.com #363, washingtonpost.com #383, aol.com #421, cnbc.com #474, behance.net #525, uol.com.br #535, ft.com #552

Ranks from the Tranco list. Full per-site data in the robots.txt study.

Other Meta bots

Meta-ExternalAgent (model training) · Meta-ExternalFetcher (user-triggered fetch) · meta-webindexer (ai search index)

Questions

What is FacebookBot?

FacebookBot is a model training bot operated by Meta, used for Meta speech and language models. An older Meta crawler documented for training speech-recognition and language models.

How do I block FacebookBot?

Add "User-agent: FacebookBot" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of each host you want to protect.

Does FacebookBot respect robots.txt?

Yes. Meta documents that FacebookBot honours robots.txt directives.

How many websites block FacebookBot?

In a Oct 29, 2026 analysis of the top 10,000 websites by Kuldeep Paul, 10% of sites with a robots.txt file fully disallowed FacebookBot.

Analysis using this data

  1. Who blocks AI crawlers? What 10,000 robots.txt files revealPublishers block training, not answers; half of all blocklists leak; Cloudflare writes the most common AI policy.
  2. The opt-out asymmetry: you can block the small AI engines, not the big oneThe AI surfaces with the most users are the ones publishers can't refuse and can't measure.

← All AI crawlers

How to cite this data

This dataset is free to use, including commercially, under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. The one rule is attribution:

  1. Credit the source as “Kuldeep Paul, kuldeep.cc” wherever you use a figure, chart or table from it.
  2. Link to this page (https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/facebookbot), not to the download file, so readers can check the source of every number.
  3. Include the date. These figures change; say “as of Oct 29, 2026” or link to the version you used.
  4. Mark changes. If you filter, recalculate or chart the data yourself, say so (“analysis based on data from…”).
  5. Cite the original source for single figures when you quote one reported number; it is linked in every row.

In running text: according to Kuldeep Paul's FacebookBot — AI crawler directory (kuldeep.cc). More in the methodology.

APA

Paul, K. (2026). FacebookBot — AI crawler directory [Data set]. kuldeep.cc. https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/facebookbot

MLA

Paul, Kuldeep. "FacebookBot — AI crawler directory." kuldeep.cc, 29 October 2026, https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/facebookbot.

Chicago

Paul, Kuldeep. 2026. "FacebookBot — AI crawler directory." Dataset. kuldeep.cc. Updated Oct 29, 2026. https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/facebookbot.

BibTeX

@misc{paul2026facebookbot, author = {Paul, Kuldeep}, title = {FacebookBot — AI crawler directory}, year = {2026}, howpublished = {\url{https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/facebookbot}}, note = {Dataset, CC BY 4.0, updated 2026-10-29} }

HTML link

<a href="https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/facebookbot">FacebookBot — AI crawler directory</a> (data: Kuldeep Paul, kuldeep.cc)