Meta (Facebook) has recently begun systematically querying a /meta.json path across millions of websites. These requests often originate from the Facebook External Hit crawler and frequently include various query string parameters related to advertising campaigns or internal tracking.

While Meta has not officially documented the purpose of this file, it appears to be an automated probe, likely part of a health check for Meta Ads, Conversion API (CAPI) configurations, or Business SDK integrations.

The Problem

If your server is not configured to handle these specific requests, they can:

• waste backend resources: each request forces your application or CMS to boot up just to return a standard "Page Not Found" error.
• skew analytics: these high-volume automated hits can clutter your access logs and performance metrics.
• impact scalability: for some sites, these requests can account for a significant percentage of total traffic, potentially slowing down legitimate user requests during traffic spikes.

What does this recipe do?

This recipe identifies any request targeting the /meta.json path, whether it includes query parameters or not, and intercepts it at the redirection.io level.

It directly sends back a response with a "404 Not Found" status code, to instruct Meta that the resource was not found, and an empty json response body to minimize the bandwidth usage and save CPU cycles on your origin server.

Also, this recipe prevents the request from being logged, so your redirection.io logs trace remains clean and easy to explore.

Before installing, please verify that your website does not intentionally use a file named meta.json for specific integrations (such as PWA manifests, custom JS configurations, or specific SEO plugins). If the /meta.json URL already responds with a 404 status code, it is safe to install this recipe.

How to install this recipe on my website with redirection.io?

Installing this recipe on your website requires the following steps:

1. click on "Install on my website"
2. review the newly created rule and edit it to fit your needs
3. publish the ruleset

The meta.json URLs should disappear from your logs shortly after the publication.