Meta AI
Also called: Llama assistant, Meta AI assistant
Meta AI is Meta's conversational AI assistant, built on its open-weight Llama models and available inside WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, the web (meta.ai), and Ray-Ban Meta glasses. It answers questions, generates images, and searches the live web without leaving Meta's apps.
Where Meta AI fits in AI search
Meta AI runs on Llama 4, the Scout and Maverick models Meta released in April 2025, using a mixture-of-experts, natively multimodal architecture. Because it lives inside apps people already open every day, its reach differs from a standalone chatbot. Meta has said it is on track to be the most-used AI assistant, and third-party trackers put usage in the hundreds of millions to over a billion monthly (figures vary by source, so treat them as estimates).
For current events, Meta AI pulls from the live web. Early on it leaned on a Bing partnership. Meta has since been building its own crawler and search stack, plus a content deal with Reuters for news. Practically, your pages can surface inside a Meta AI reply the same way they appear in an AI Overview or a Perplexity answer.
Meta names its bots in the user-agent string. Two worth knowing:
meta-externalagent # trains foundation models, indexes content
meta-webindexer # improves AI search result qualityBlocking meta-externalagent in robots.txt keeps your content out of Llama training. Leaving meta-webindexer reachable keeps you eligible to be cited in search-grounded answers. Set each one deliberately, they are not the same lever.
How it affects your traffic
Meta AI answers questions right inside WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook, so a slice of the audience that once clicked through to your site now gets its answer without a visit. If your pages are structured to be quoted and your Meta crawler rules are set correctly, you can be the source that assistant names instead of a competitor. That is the point of our AI SEO work: making your brand the answer across Meta AI, AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, not just a blue link in classic search.
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