CrowdTangle
CrowdTangle is an SEO crawler operated by Meta. It maps link graphs, ranking signals, and on-page audits, usually for a SaaS product that helps marketers monitor their own or competitor sites.
Volume can be heavy. SEO crawlers often request every page on a site, and several can hit you in parallel if multiple customers are auditing your domain at once.
Most are well-behaved, respect robots.txt, and back off when rate-limited. The trade-off for allowing them is being visible inside the marketing tools your customers and competitors use.
See CrowdTangle on your own site
Match the User-Agent header on incoming requests against the pattern below.
regex
Verify by IP
For higher confidence, also verify the source IP against the operator's published ranges. UA strings can be spoofed; IP ownership is harder to fake.
Renders JavaScript
No
IP verification
Published IP ranges
Crawl frequency
Heavy on demand
Honors robots.txt
Yes
Honors Crawl-delay
Yes
Meta runs 16 bots in total. Each one is a separate user-agent so you can allow or block them independently.
Link Unfurler
9Training Crawler
3Live-Fetch AI
2AI Search Index
1SEO Crawler
1- CrowdTangleYou are here
Should I let CrowdTangle through?
In most cases, yes. Useful to be visible in SEO tooling, but volume can be heavy. Rate-limit to keep the load manageable. If volume gets noisy, rate-limit it before you block it outright.
Does blocking CrowdTangle affect my Google rankings?
No. CrowdTangle is not a search-engine crawler. Your ranking on Google or Bing is unaffected by what you do here.
How do I confirm a request is really from CrowdTangle?
Two checks. The User-Agent header should match a known CrowdTangle string, and the request's source IP should fall inside Meta's published ranges. The User-Agent alone is trivially spoofable, so the IP check is what gives you confidence. Meta publishes the ranges so you can validate at the CDN or edge.
Why is a third-party tool crawling my site?
Someone, possibly a competitor running a backlink audit, possibly your own team, set up a job in Meta. The crawler runs on their schedule. Blocking it only blocks their visibility into your site, it doesn't break anything user-facing.
How is CrowdTangle different from Meta's other bots?
Meta splits work across multiple user-agents so site owners can decide on each one independently. Training crawlers, live-fetch agents, search indexers, and agentic browsers each get their own name. Worth scanning the rest of the Meta family above to see which ones actually matter for your site.
What's the cleanest way to control CrowdTangle?
Two layers. Robots.txt for the polite crawlers that read it, and rules at your CDN or edge for the ones that don't. Rankly's Agent Experience handles both from a single config, so you can allow, block, rate-limit, or serve a stripped-down version per bot. Agent Analytics handles the observation half so you know which bots are actually worth a rule.
Verify everything above against the operator's own documentation.