Meta-ExternalAds
Meta-ExternalAds is a link preview fetcher for a social network run by Meta Platforms, Inc..
- Operator
- Meta Platforms, Inc.
- Type
- Social Media Agent
- Official page
- developers.facebook.com
- In Vireo
- Excluded, reported under Link previews
User agent
Requests from Meta-ExternalAds carry a user agent like this:
meta-externaladsDevice Detector identifies it with this pattern (a case-insensitive regular expression):
meta-externaladsAnyone can put any name in a user agent. Where the operator publishes IP ranges, checking the request's address against them is the way to confirm a visit is genuine.
How Vireo counts Meta-ExternalAds
Vireo keeps requests from Meta-ExternalAds out of your pageviews and visitors and counts them on its bot report under Link previews, so you can see how much it left out rather than wonder why your server logs show more traffic.
Checked by running Vireo Analytics' own bot filter over Meta-ExternalAds's user agents.
Sources
- Meta-ExternalAds information page (developers.facebook.com)
- Matomo Device Detector, bots.yml (LGPL-3.0)
Other bots from Meta Platforms, Inc.
More link previews
- Bluesky (Bluesky Social PBC)
- Facebook Crawler (Meta)
- facebookexternalhit (Meta/Facebook)
- KeybaseBot (Zoom Video Communications, Inc)
- LinkedIn Bot (LinkedIn)
- Magpie-Crawler (Brandwatch)
- Meta-ExternalFetcher (Meta)
- Pinterest (Pinterest)
- Reddit Bot (reddit inc.)
- Slackbot (Slack)
See the bots on your own site
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