Meta, the social media company that operates Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads, is allegedly crawling the web and in the process of building its own search engine. Pieter Levels posted about this pattern on X and wrote, "Meta is ALLEGEDLY building their own Google search engine, so that if their AI does a web search it doesn't end up at Google, as Google could then use it for THEIR training, so they want their own web index that they will then use as their own Meta search engine for their AI."
He posted these screenshots showing the crawling of his properties:
Facebook has wanted to build its own search service for well over a decade. Eventually, Facebook partnered with Bing to power its web search features only to drop the partnership a couple of years later. I mean, I have a devoted section on this site to just Facebook search but now we are in the world of AI.
Facebook, like Google, like Microsoft, like X and like all the other big companies want to build out its own AI. To do so, you might not be able to depend on partners to give you a web index. So this does make sense as a next step for Facebook/Meta...
Meta staff DM'd me secretly
— @levelsio (@levelsio) August 6, 2026
Posted with permission
Meta is ALLEGEDLY building their own Google search engine, so that if their AI does a web search it doesn't end up at Google, as Google could then use it for THEIR training, so they want their own web index that they will then… https://t.co/bpjkqRO7rT
Forum discussion at X.
