Facebook

Facebook is assigned to the Social category by BotScope. Detection is based on the user-agent string. Current pattern:

(facebookexternalhit|Facebot)

Social media platforms index content for their internal search and for preview cards in posts. Unlike search engine crawlers they often limit themselves to URLs that were shared on their platform.

BotScope maps Facebook requests onto your session timeline — you spot bursts, can filter them per path, and compare against other bots in the same category.

robots.txt directive for Facebook

If you don't want Facebook to crawl your site, add the following block to your /robots.txt. This works only for bots that honour robots.txt — malicious crawlers ignore it.

User-agent: facebookexternalhit
Disallow: /

This page is being enriched with detail knowledge about Facebook.

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