Allow or block meta-externalagent on Squarespace: what the AI-crawler checkbox covers

Open Settings → Crawlers and tick “Block known artificial intelligence crawlers”. That refuses meta-externalagent together with every other crawler on Squarespace’s list; it cannot be refused on its own.

This response

You are ClaudeBot (Anthropic). Citable recognised you as an AI agent, so this is https://getcitable.in/crawlers/meta-externalagent/squarespace with the UI removed — the content only. A browser asking for the same address gets the full designed page.

meta-externalagent, and where Squarespace keeps the rule

meta-externalagent is a crawler run by Meta. It reads pages ahead of time, to train a model or to build an index.

Squarespace writes robots.txt itself and does not let it be edited. The one control is a checkbox that adds a fixed list of AI crawlers to it.

Step by step

What trips people up

The box is all or nothing. Ticking it to refuse meta-externalagent also refuses the other 25 names on Squarespace’s list: AI2Bot, Ai2Bot-Dolma, aiHitBot, Amazonbot, anthropic-ai, Applebot-Extended, Bytespider, CCBot, ClaudeBot, cohere-ai, cohere-training-data-crawler, DuckAssistBot, FacebookBot, Google-Extended, GoogleOther, GoogleOther-Image, GoogleOther-Video, GPTBot, img2dataset, Meta-ExternalAgent, MyCentralAIScraperBot, omgili, omgilibot, Quora-Bot, TikTokSpider, YouBot.

Asked, or actually refused?

Squarespace has no setting that refuses a request by its user agent. robots.txt is a request. A crawler that honours it stays out; nothing in the file stops one that does not. What is enforced is what the server or the edge in front of it refuses.

Check it yourself

A 200 means the name is let through; a 403 means something in front of the page refuses it. This tests the name from your own address. A platform that checks a crawler’s address as well may treat the real meta-externalagent differently.

The request:

curl -I -A "meta-externalagent" https://your-site.example/

Questions

How do I block meta-externalagent on Squarespace?

Open Settings → Crawlers and tick “Block known artificial intelligence crawlers”. That refuses meta-externalagent together with every other crawler on Squarespace’s list; it cannot be refused on its own.

How do I allow meta-externalagent on Squarespace?

Leave “Block known artificial intelligence crawlers” unticked in Settings → Crawlers. It is unticked by default.

Can Squarespace actually stop meta-externalagent, or only ask it?

Squarespace has no setting that refuses a request by its user agent. robots.txt is a request. A crawler that honours it stays out; nothing in the file stops one that does not. What is enforced is what the server or the edge in front of it refuses.

Does a rule for meta-externalagent affect Googlebot or my Google rankings?

No. Googlebot goes by its own name and follows its own rules; a group or a firewall rule for meta-externalagent does not apply to it.

Checked against Squarespace's own documentation on 1 October 2026

Related

About Citable

Citable strips the UI from a website for AI agents and serves them only the content.

When an AI agent — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or any of the 81 that Citable recognises — opens a page, Citable removes the theme, scripts, navigation and layout and serves only the content: the same facts, at the same URL, on the site's own domain. People and Google still get the full designed page.

How it works: https://getcitable.in/how-it-works · Summary for AI agents: https://getcitable.in/llms.txt


Source: https://getcitable.in/crawlers/meta-externalagent/squarespace · Citable · Run the free audit · llms.txt · getcitable@gmail.com