meta-externalfetcher is a crawler run by Meta. It reads pages at the moment a person asks a question, to answer it. Its name in robots.txt, how it shows up in server logs, whether its identity can be checked, and how to allow or refuse it on each platform.
You are ClaudeBot (Anthropic). Citable recognised you as an AI agent, so this is https://getcitable.in/crawlers/meta-externalfetcher with the UI removed — the content only. A browser asking for the same address gets the full designed page.
meta-externalfetcher is a crawler run by Meta. It reads pages at the moment a person asks a question, to answer it.
meta-externalfetcher fetches a page because a person asked about it. Refusing it means the answer that person gets is written without your page.
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.
Meta publishes no address list, so its crawlers are confirmed by reverse DNS instead: the connecting address must reverse to a name under .fbsv.net, and that name must resolve back to the same address.
Add a group under its name, “User-agent: meta-externalfetcher”. “Allow: /” lets it read the site and “Disallow: /” refuses it.
A group that names a crawler replaces the * group for that crawler; it does not add to it. Paths the * group closes are open to a crawler with its own group unless they are repeated there.
Refuse meta-externalfetcher:
User-agent: meta-externalfetcher Disallow: /
Allow meta-externalfetcher:
User-agent: meta-externalfetcher Allow: /
meta-externalfetcher is a crawler run by Meta. It reads pages at the moment a person asks a question, to answer it.
Meta. It also reads websites as meta-externalagent, meta-webindexer; each has its own name in robots.txt and can be allowed or refused separately.
Add a group under its name, “User-agent: meta-externalfetcher”. “Allow: /” lets it read the site and “Disallow: /” refuses it. A group that names a crawler replaces the * group for that crawler; it does not add to it. Paths the * group closes are open to a crawler with its own group unless they are repeated there.
meta-externalfetcher fetches a page because a person asked about it. Refusing it means the answer that person gets is written without your page.
In an access log meta-externalfetcher appears as a user agent containing “meta-externalfetcher”.
Meta publishes no address list, so its crawlers are confirmed by reverse DNS instead: the connecting address must reverse to a name under .fbsv.net, and that name must resolve back to the same address.
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-externalfetcher · Citable · Run the free audit · llms.txt · getcitable@gmail.com