Which sites block meta-externalfetcher?

Meta · declared purpose: on-demand fetch for a user's prompt · latest sealed date 2026-08-07.

On 2026-08-07, 1,288 of the 61,552 panel domains that served a parseable robots.txt name meta-externalfetcher explicitly. 960 of them (1.6% of parsed) disallow it from the entire site, 175 restrict it to part of the site, and 153 name it and allow it. The remaining 60,264 parsed domains do not mention it at all — their wildcard group governs it.

What the denominator is. On 2026-08-07 we attempted /robots.txt on 100,000 panel domains. 24,130 could not be reached at all (DNS failure, TLS failure, timeout, refused connection) and 14,318 answered with something other than a 200. Both of those groups have no observed AI-crawler policy, and neither is counted as allowing anything — an unreachable site is UNKNOWN, not permissive. Every crawler figure below is out of the 61,552 domains that returned a robots.txt we could parse on that date.

Blocks outright — the file has a group for that exact product token containing Disallow: / with no overriding allow. Partly restricts — a group exists with at least one non-empty Disallow, but not the whole site. Names & allows — a group exists with no effective Disallow. Everything else is not mentioned: the wildcard * group governs it, and wildcard effects are counted separately rather than folded in, because a site that blocks everything has not made a decision about any AI crawler in particular. Matching is exact and case-insensitive per RFC 9309 — never substring.

Get told when meta-externalfetcher change their AI crawler rules

Sites publish today's robots.txt and overwrite it — no archive, no history, no notification. We keep a dated daily copy. Leave your email and we'll send you what moved for meta-externalfetcher: who started blocking, who stopped, and on which day.

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What moved: meta-externalfetcher verdict changes

Counted domains whose robots.txt changed what meta-externalfetcher may do, between one sealed date and the previous one. Aggregate only — we do not publish which site.

Across the whole archive: 320 meta-externalfetcher verdict transitions, of which 128 moved TO a full block and 79 moved AWAY from one.

Sealed date	Verdict moved	Domains
2026-08-07	not mentioned → partly restricted	3
2026-08-07	not mentioned → named and allowed	2
2026-08-07	blocked outright → not mentioned	2
2026-08-07	not mentioned → blocked outright	1
2026-08-07	partly restricted → not mentioned	1
2026-08-06	not mentioned → blocked outright	2
2026-08-06	blocked outright → not mentioned	2
2026-08-06	not mentioned → named and allowed	1
2026-08-05	not mentioned → partly restricted	1
2026-08-05	named and allowed → partly restricted	1
2026-08-04	not mentioned → partly restricted	5
2026-08-04	named and allowed → partly restricted	2
2026-08-04	not mentioned → blocked outright	1
2026-08-03	not mentioned → named and allowed	1
2026-08-02	blocked outright → not mentioned	3
2026-08-01	not mentioned → blocked outright	2
2026-08-01	blocked outright → not mentioned	1
2026-07-31	not mentioned → blocked outright	3
2026-07-31	not mentioned → named and allowed	2
2026-07-31	blocked outright → not mentioned	2
2026-07-31	blocked outright → named and allowed	1
2026-07-30	not mentioned → blocked outright	3
2026-07-30	blocked outright → not mentioned	3
2026-07-30	not mentioned → partly restricted	1
2026-07-30	not mentioned → named and allowed	1
2026-07-30	named and allowed → partly restricted	1
2026-07-29	not mentioned → blocked outright	3
2026-07-29	not mentioned → named and allowed	1
2026-07-29	blocked outright → not mentioned	1
2026-07-28	not mentioned → blocked outright	4
2026-07-28	not mentioned → named and allowed	1
2026-07-27	not mentioned → blocked outright	2
2026-07-27	blocked outright → not mentioned	2
2026-07-26	blocked outright → not mentioned	1
2026-07-25	not mentioned → blocked outright	2
2026-07-25	blocked outright → not mentioned	2
2026-07-25	not mentioned → partly restricted	1
2026-07-24	not mentioned → blocked outright	5
2026-07-24	partly restricted → not mentioned	4
2026-07-24	not mentioned → partly restricted	2

Read this before quoting a trend. We hold 55 sealed daily snapshots between 2026-06-09 and 2026-08-07, out of 60 calendar days. 5 calendar day(s) inside that span have no collection run at all: 2026-06-11, 2026-06-12, 2026-06-19, 2026-07-04, 2026-07-15. Consecutive rows in every table below are consecutive SEALED dates, not consecutive days — where a gap falls, that row's diff covers more than 24 hours, and the span is printed with it. We do not interpolate across a day we did not collect.

Every sealed date

The denominator column is the number of panel domains that served a parseable robots.txt that day. It moves, so a raw count moves with it — compare the ratio, not the count.

Sealed date	Names it	Blocks outright	Partly restricts	Names & allows	Parsed that day
2026-08-07	1,288	960	175	153	61,552
2026-08-06	1,284	962	171	151	61,421
2026-08-05	1,283	961	172	150	61,527
2026-08-04	1,282	961	170	151	61,620
2026-08-03	1,277	960	163	154	61,533
2026-08-02	1,276	960	164	152	61,559
2026-08-01	1,281	964	164	153	61,326
2026-07-31	1,279	962	164	153	61,595
2026-07-30	1,271	961	161	149	61,444
2026-07-29	1,274	965	159	150	61,492
2026-07-28	1,264	957	159	148	61,562
2026-07-27	1,260	953	160	147	61,440
2026-07-26	1,260	954	158	148	61,573
2026-07-25	1,261	955	158	148	61,584
2026-07-24	1,257	954	156	147	61,576
2026-07-23	1,260	953	159	148	61,758
2026-07-22	1,261	954	158	149	61,744
2026-07-21	1,257	953	157	147	61,565
2026-07-20	1,255	953	156	146	61,665
2026-07-19	1,251	951	155	145	61,451
2026-07-18	1,255	955	154	146	61,782
2026-07-17	1,253	956	152	145	61,659
2026-07-16	1,250	958	148	144	61,526
2026-07-14	1,218	926	147	145	61,542
2026-07-13	1,209	922	145	142	61,448
2026-07-12	1,208	925	142	141	61,518
2026-07-11	1,206	920	144	142	61,526
2026-07-10	1,211	924	145	142	61,425
2026-07-09	1,209	925	142	142	61,495
2026-07-08	1,209	924	145	140	61,364
2026-07-07	1,207	924	142	141	61,491
2026-07-06	1,202	920	142	140	61,455
2026-07-05	1,203	922	141	140	61,562
2026-07-03	1,204	922	142	140	61,535
2026-07-02	1,202	924	139	139	61,553
2026-07-01	1,199	920	139	140	61,599
2026-06-30	1,192	916	139	137	61,590
2026-06-29	1,191	914	141	136	61,814
2026-06-28	1,191	915	141	135	61,835
2026-06-27	1,187	915	138	134	61,848
2026-06-26	1,187	915	139	133	61,851
2026-06-25	1,182	912	140	130	61,867
2026-06-24	1,180	914	137	129	61,660
2026-06-23	1,185	918	138	129	61,877
2026-06-22	1,185	918	137	130	61,911
2026-06-21	1,185	917	138	130	61,905
2026-06-20	1,182	916	137	129	61,754
2026-06-18	1,183	916	137	130	61,805
2026-06-17	1,187	921	137	129	61,952
2026-06-16	1,187	923	136	128	61,645
2026-06-15	1,191	924	137	130	61,715
2026-06-14	1,186	925	137	124	61,697
2026-06-13	1,182	921	137	124	61,648
2026-06-10	1,171	914	137	120	61,489
2026-06-09	1,167	911	137	119	61,599

Why you will not find a robots.txt file here. These pages render mechanical verdicts and aggregate diffs, never a fetched body. Site operators leave contact addresses in robots.txt comments — on the 2026-08-06 snapshot 2,200 of the distinct bodies we fetched contain an email-shaped string — and republishing bodies would republish those. Nothing on this surface identifies an individual site, either: every figure is a count.

Compiled from each site's own published /robots.txt, /ai.txt, /llms.txt and /.well-known/tdmrep.json, fetched daily over a frozen 100,000-domain research panel (source list: Tranco; no Tranco rank is republished here). Verdicts are mechanical readings of what those files say under RFC 9309 grouping with exact product-token matching — they are not legal advice, not a statement about any site's intentions, and not a claim about what any crawler actually did. A robots.txt is a request, not an access control. Figures are provided for informational purposes only and carry no warranty of accuracy or completeness.

AI crawler policy home · What changed · How this is collected · US Tech Automations.