Identification
Its full user-agent string, exactly as it arrives at the gate:
Meta does not publish a way to verify Meta-ExternalAgent's traffic. Treat its user agent as a claim, not proof: anyone can send it. Read Meta's documentation.
How to block Meta-ExternalAgent
Add these two lines to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. Well-behaved crawlers read it before they crawl, so the change applies from Meta-ExternalAgent's next visit. Nothing else on your site needs to change.
# Block Meta-ExternalAgent from the whole site User-agent: meta-externalagent Disallow: /
Or let it visit but keep it away from part of the site:
# Let it in, but keep it out of one room User-agent: meta-externalagent Allow: / Disallow: /members/
Observed behaviour
Nothing on record in the last 30 days.
Requested 0 disallowed pages out of 0 requests. Never read robots.txt.
Has never followed the hidden link to /trap/. Either well trained or very lucky.
Where it comes from
The networks Meta-ExternalAgent's visits came from:
Nothing on record in the last 30 days.
Networks and countries come from the visitor's IP address, looked up in a local copy of the DB-IP database. The addresses themselves are never stored.
Questions site owners ask
Does Meta-ExternalAgent respect robots.txt?
We can't say yet. It has not fetched robots.txt here, and it has not touched a disallowed page either.
Will blocking Meta-ExternalAgent hurt my search rankings?
No. Meta-ExternalAgent isn't used by Google or Bing to rank pages. Blocking it only affects whether Meta collects your content.
How often does Meta-ExternalAgent visit?
Here, about 0 requests a day over the last week. Visits to your site depend on its size, how often it changes, and how many links point to it.