Meta
meta-webindexer
Builds the index behind Meta AI search.
When you see it: Meta is indexing your page for its AI search results.
How we check it is really Meta
- 01
The user agent has to contain meta-webindexer.
Meta publishes neither IP ranges nor a reverse DNS record, so this is the honest ceiling: the visit is recorded as a claim. We would rather show you an unverified row than a tick we cannot back.
What each result means
- verified
- The address matched Meta's own published records. This really was them.
- unverified
- We could not confirm it, and that is all it means. The operator may publish nothing to check against, a published list may be behind the addresses actually in use, or DNS may simply have been slow. It is not an accusation.
- spoofed
- The address belongs to somebody else — its own reverse DNS record resolves to a different owner. That is positive evidence of a forgery rather than a failure to find evidence, which is why it is reported as its own result and never folded into the row above.
The distinction costs nothing to make and is the reason these numbers can be shown to someone who will ask where they came from. A report that cannot separate “we do not know” from “this was faked” invites exactly one question it cannot answer.
No list to check against
Meta publishes neither an address file nor a reverse DNS record for this crawler. There is nothing to check a request against, which is why every visit from it is recorded as an unverified claim.
- Operator
- Meta
- Token
- meta-webindexer
- Counted as
- Search indexing
- Verification
- User agent only
- Runs JavaScript
- No
- Operator docs
- Published
User agent
meta-webindexerMatched as a token, not as a full browser string. Meta adds and changes the version and product text around it without notice, so a filter pinned to the whole header stops working the first time they bump a version while one matching meta-webindexer keeps working. The same string is what Meta names in robots.txt.
Meta's other crawlers
Meta sends 4 crawlers, each with its own token and its own job. They are counted separately for that reason — the tokens differ by a few characters and what the fetch means does not, so folding them into one operator row would let indexing look like AI interest.
| Token | Counted as | Verification | What it fetches for |
|---|---|---|---|
meta-webindexerthis page | Indexing | User agent only | Builds the index behind Meta AI search. |
| meta-externalfetcher | AI answers | User agent only | Fetches a specific URL a person asked Meta AI about. |
| meta-externalagent | Training | User agent only | Meta's training corpus crawler. |
| meta-externalads | Other AI traffic | User agent only | Meta's crawler for advertising and business products. |
Your analytics never mentioned meta-webindexer because it cannot see it.
This crawler takes your HTML and leaves without running a line of JavaScript, so a browser tag records nothing. TrueStat reads it server-side, checks the address, and shows you which pages it fetched — including the ones that returned a 404.