AI crawler directory
Meta · AI assistants answering shoppers
Should your store allow Meta-ExternalFetcher?
Meta AI (WhatsApp / Instagram) fetching your page on a user's behalf.
THE VERDICT
Allow it.
This bot fetches your page when a shopper asks a personal agent about you. Block it and that agent cannot read your store to answer — you become invisible, with no error and no trace in your analytics.
THE TECHNICAL BITS
- robots.txt token
- meta-externalfetcher
- Operated by
- Meta
- Purpose
- AI assistants answering shoppers
To allow it, make sure your CDN/WAF (Cloudflare, Akamai, etc.) doesn't challenge or block requests whose user-agent contains meta-externalfetcher, and that robots.txt doesn't disallow your product paths for it.
Is Meta-ExternalFetcher reaching your store right now?
ARC tests your store against Meta-ExternalFetcher and every other AI crawler — for real — and shows who you're accidentally blocking, whether AI understands your products, and whether it can reach checkout.
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