What Meta's crawler
sees on your link page.
By the peekin team. Updated . 4 minute read.
When you add a link to Instagram or post one, Meta fetches the page with a crawler called facebookexternalhit. It reads the HTML, the title, the description, the Open Graph preview tags and any addresses in the page. If your paid link is in that HTML, Meta can read it.
The crawler, in plain terms
Meta documents its link crawler for web developers. Its user agent includes the name facebookexternalhit. It fetches a page when a link is shared, so that Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp can show a preview and check the link.
It is not a person and it does not tap buttons. It asks for the page, reads what comes back, and stores what it needs. Whatever is in that first response is what Meta knows about your page.
What it reads
- The HTML. Every link written into the page, every piece of text, and any data the page ships inside itself.
- The title and description. The words in the page's head, which people rarely see but crawlers always read.
- Open Graph tags. The tags that build a preview card: a title, a description, an image and the page address.
- Redirects. If the page sends the crawler straight on to another address, the crawler follows and learns that address too.
- The robots instruction. Whether the page asks search engines to index it.
It does not need to run every script to learn a lot. On most link pages, the destinations are plain links in the HTML.
Why most link pages give the destination away
Link pages are built to be fast and easy to find. The simplest way to do that is to write every button as an ordinary link in the HTML, with a preview card that shows your name and photo.
That is a sensible design for a musician or a shop. For an adult creator it means one fetch tells the crawler your name, your face and the paid platform you sell on. The association is made by the page, not by anything you posted.
How to see it yourself
You do not have to trust anyone's description. There are three easy ways to look.
- Meta's own Sharing Debugger, on Meta for Developers, shows what Meta scraped from any address and the preview it built.
- Paste your link into a private chat with yourself on Messenger or WhatsApp and see what preview appears.
- Run it through our free scanner, which fetches the page the way the crawler does and runs nine checks, including whether the paid address is readable.
Try it on your current page with your paid link on it. That is the version that matters.
What a page built for this does differently
A page that is safe to point an adult bio at sends the crawler the same page a fan gets, but with nothing in it to connect. On peekin, that means:
- No destination in the HTML. Each button carries a stand-in. The real address is given out only after a person taps and passes the 18+ check.
- No preview card naming you or a platform.
- A noindex instruction, so search engines do not list the page.
- The same document for the crawler as for a person. We never show a platform a different page from a person, because that is cloaking, and it is against the rules of every major platform.
The point is not to hide from Meta. It is to make sure there is nothing on the page to read in the first place.
Other crawlers read the same things
Search engines, X, Telegram, Discord and chat apps all build previews the same way. Many AI tools also fetch pages to answer questions. Anything a page publishes to Meta's crawler, it publishes to all of them.
So the question is not just "what does Meta see". It is "what does my page say to anyone who asks". Our guide to shared link domains covers the one signal that sits outside the page: the address itself.
If you want a page built this way, Starter is £3.99 a month, Creator £9.99, Pro £19.99, and Agency £39 a month for 3 creators, then £12 each.
A quick test you can run today
Take the link that is in your Instagram bio right now and do three things. Open it on a computer and use the browser's option to view the page source. Search that source for the name of your paid platform. Then paste the link into a private chat and look at the preview.
If the platform name is in the source, or the preview shows your name and photo with it, a crawler is getting the same. That is the thing to fix first. The scanner does all of this for you and adds the checks that are harder to do by hand, such as trackers and referrer leaks.
Asked most often.
What is facebookexternalhit?
It is the name Meta's link crawler uses when it fetches a page to build a preview or check a link shared on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger or WhatsApp. Meta documents it for developers.
Can I block Meta's crawler?
You can, but a page that refuses the crawler is unusual and can draw attention. It also breaks previews. A page with nothing to read is a better answer than a page that hides.
How do I see what Meta scraped from my page?
Use the Sharing Debugger on Meta for Developers, or run the page through our free scanner.
Check your own page first
The scanner reads any link page the way Meta's crawler does and runs nine checks. It is free and needs no account. If you want a page built this way, the plans start at the price on the pricing page.