Websites blocking FacebookBot
An older Meta crawler that Meta documents as crawling public pages to improve language models for its speech recognition technology.
Operated by Meta · Training crawler · operator documentation
4.30%
block FacebookBot
1.06 million of 24.68 million domains with a known robots.txt policy
0.71%
block it by name
174K domains, the rest inherit a blanket
* block
2.34%
restrict it by name
578K domains name it and close some of its paths
3.22%
name it in robots.txt
793K domains give it rules of their own
Data for Oct 2026. All four percentages
divide by the same 24.68 million domains. Blocked counts both
explicit User-agent: FacebookBot blocks and blanket
* blocks the crawler inherits.
Blocking trend
2%
4%
6%
Aug 2026
Sep 2026
Oct 2026
Share of domains with a known robots.txt policy
blocking FacebookBot in each monthly crawl. The denominator moves with each crawl and is
defined in the methodology.
Historical mentions, HTTP Archive
1%
2%
3%
Jul 2021
Nov 2022
Feb 2024
Jul 2025
Oct 2026
Share of sites in each month's
HTTP Archive crawl whose robots.txt named
FacebookBot. This series counts
mentions only (the archive keeps no rule text), comes from a different population than our own
crawl above, and the two are never merged.
High-authority sites blocking FacebookBot by name
| Domain | OPROpen Page Rank | Blocking since |
|---|---|---|
| vimeo.com | 9.54/10 | Sep 2026 |
| nytimes.com | 9.28/10 | Aug 2026 |
| tumblr.com | 9.27/10 | Aug 2026 |
| usatoday.com | 9.08/10 | Sep 2026 |
| bandcamp.com | 9.06/10 | Aug 2026 |
| ed.gov | 9.05/10 | Oct 2026 |
| investopedia.com | 9.01/10 | Oct 2026 |
| fastcompany.com | 9.00/10 | Oct 2026 |
| healthline.com | 8.98/10 | Aug 2026 |
| wa.gov | 8.93/10 | Oct 2026 |
| uol.com.br | 8.92/10 | Oct 2026 |
| huffpost.com | 8.91/10 | Aug 2026 |
| amazon.ca | 8.91/10 | Oct 2026 |
| newsweek.com | 8.90/10 | Sep 2026 |
| heise.de | 8.88/10 | Oct 2026 |
| mashable.com | 8.87/10 | Sep 2026 |
| francetvinfo.fr | 8.87/10 | Aug 2026 |
| politico.eu | 8.85/10 | Oct 2026 |
| arstechnica.com | 8.84/10 | Aug 2026 |
| buzzfeed.com | 8.84/10 | Oct 2026 |
| medicalnewstoday.com | 8.83/10 | Aug 2026 |
| radiofrance.fr | 8.82/10 | Aug 2026 |
| virginia.gov | 8.82/10 | Oct 2026 |
| wikihow.com | 8.81/10 | Aug 2026 |
| zeit.de | 8.81/10 | Sep 2026 |
| pcmag.com | 8.80/10 | Aug 2026 |
| slate.com | 8.80/10 | Oct 2026 |
| nikkei.com | 8.79/10 | Oct 2026 |
| lesechos.fr | 8.79/10 | Oct 2026 |
| technologyreview.com | 8.78/10 | Oct 2026 |
Sites whose robots.txt names FacebookBot (or a legacy
alias) with a full block, ranked by Open Page Rank. Sites blocking every crawler with a blanket
* rule are counted above but not listed here. Since dates start at our first
observation of the rule.