Facebook Crawler Simulator & Tester
Last updated
Simulate a Facebook crawler visit to any URL on your website. Crawl the page and inspect the HTML and Open Graph tags Meta reads for link previews.
Simulate a Facebook Crawler visit
Enter any URL on your website to crawl it as Facebook Crawler and inspect the HTML it gets.
How to use the Facebook Crawler simulator
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Step 1
Enter a URL
Paste the full URL of any page on your website, such as a product page, a blog post, or the home page.
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Step 2
Select the Facebook Crawler user agent
The tester sends the request with the Facebook Crawler user-agent string, so your server answers the way it answers a real Facebook Crawler visit.
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Step 3
Run the crawl
The simulator requests the page as Facebook Crawler and follows redirects, the same way the crawler does.
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Step 4
Inspect the HTML
Check the status code, redirects, response headers, raw HTML, word count, and Open Graph tags Facebook Crawler gets. If your main content is missing from the HTML, Facebook Crawler cannot read it.
What is Facebook Crawler?
Facebook's crawler (facebookexternalhit) fetches your web pages to generate link previews when content is shared on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Messenger. It reads Open Graph meta tags to display titles, descriptions, and images. The Meta-ExternalAgent crawler is also used for content understanding across Meta's platforms.
Why allow Facebook Crawler?
Facebook Crawler robots.txt configuration
Control how Facebook Crawler crawls your website using robots.txt directives. Add these rules to your robots.txt file at the root of your domain, then run the simulator again on the same URL to confirm the change.
Allow Facebook Crawler
# Allow Facebook/Meta crawlers User-agent: facebookexternalhit Allow: / User-agent: Meta-ExternalAgent Allow: / User-agent: FacebookBot Allow: /
Block Facebook Crawler
# Block Facebook/Meta crawlers (not recommended) User-agent: facebookexternalhit Disallow: / User-agent: Meta-ExternalAgent Disallow: /
User-Agent String: facebookexternalhit/1.1 (+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext)
Facebook Crawler simulator FAQ
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