Meta’s new business terms let it crawl business websites and train its products on them from 30 October

If your business runs Facebook or Instagram ads, manages a Page or sells through a Meta catalogue, Meta’s updated Commercial Terms will give it permission to crawl your website, and other sites associated with your business, and use what it finds to train its products. The new version takes effect on 30 October 2026.

The change was reported by Nieman Lab on 15 October and has since drawn criticism from news publishers in the United States. Meta disputes how it has been characterised.

What the terms say

Meta’s Commercial Terms sit on top of its ordinary terms of service. They apply to anyone using Meta products “for any business or commercial purpose”, which the terms say includes using ads or marketing messages, selling or listing products, developing apps, managing Pages and groups, and using business tools such as Ads Manager. You must also ensure that any third party on whose behalf you use those products follows the terms, and you confirm that you can bind it to them, so an agency managing a client’s ads brings that client in too.

The updated version, which Meta has published as a preview with a banner saying the updates “will come into effect on 30 October 2026”, adds a paragraph to the section on licences you give Meta. In it, you “authorise us (or any entity acting on our behalf) to use automated software”, such as crawlers and bots, and to “create test credentials to access, index, cache, analyse, collect, retrieve or crawl” “the domains, web pages or URLs (and any content available through them) that are associated with your products or services”, or that are made available through your or users’ use of Meta’s products and services. Meta may also periodically pull updates from those pages.

Meta may then use that content to “provide, develop, improve, research, train and maintain the integrity of” its products and features.

Two points stand out on our reading. “Associated with your products or services” isn’t defined, so it isn’t clear whether it means only the page an ad links to or the whole site. And the terms don’t mention robots.txt or any other opt-out.

Does it apply in Australia?

Yes, as far as we can tell. The Commercial Terms are a single global document; we found no separate Australian version. For businesses outside the US, the disputes section sends claims against Meta Platforms Ireland Limited to the Irish courts, and adds that a small business that resides, or is located, in Australia can rely on Australian law and bring claims in any competent Australian court.

What critics and reporters say

The News/Media Alliance, a US publishers’ body, issued a statement on 16 October in which its chief executive, Danielle Coffey, called the terms “outrageous and probably illegal”. The alliance says “there is currently no option for business accounts to opt out”, other than giving up Meta’s business products, and argues that any business with a Meta account and its own content online, not just newsrooms, is exposed.

According to The Register, Nieman Lab noted that almost every news publisher has at least one Meta business account. Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman told The Register that the law doesn’t necessarily require anyone to obey robots.txt, and asked whether ending the business relationship would be the only way to avoid the terms. The Register said Meta didn’t respond to its request for comment.

What Meta says

Meta rejects the news-scraping reading. PPC Land reports that Meta spokesperson Andy Stone posted on X that “this is false” and that there is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers. It quotes him saying the update is meant to let Meta “pull accurate information about products for sale on third-party websites” for ad and content recommendations. According to the same report, a Meta spokesperson told Nieman Lab the crawling language had previously been spread across several sets of terms and has now been consolidated, and that content owners can still use robots.txt to manage access.

That product-information limit isn’t written into the clause itself, which refers generally to content “associated with your products or services” and to content made available through use of Meta’s products.

The robots.txt question

Meta’s own crawler documentation lists several user agents. The one most relevant here is meta-externalagent, which Meta says crawls for uses such as “training foundation AI models or improving products by indexing content directly”. It also lists meta-webindexer (for Meta AI search results), meta-externalads (for advertising and business products) and facebookexternalhit (for link previews when someone shares your page). Meta says facebookexternalhit might bypass robots.txt for security or integrity checks, that meta-externalfetcher may bypass it when fetching links at a user’s request, and that robots.txt changes can take up to 24 hours to apply.

On our reading, blocking meta-externalagent in robots.txt is the practical step available. Whether that blocking survives the contractual permission in the new terms is exactly what lawyers and publishers are arguing about, and Meta’s assurances so far come from public statements rather than the terms. If your site sits behind Cloudflare, its AI training controls can publish a no-training instruction for you.

Checklist

• Read the updated terms. Check Meta’s preview of the Commercial Terms before they take effect on 30 October 2026.
• Work out which sites are linked. List the domains your ads, Page, catalogue and shop link to, since those are the most likely to count as “associated” with your products.
• Check your robots.txt. Decide whether to disallow meta-externalagent, leaving facebookexternalhit alone, because Meta uses it to generate link previews when people share your pages.
• Tell your clients if you’re an agency. The terms require you to ensure any third party on whose behalf you use Meta’s business tools follows them.
• Decide whether to stay. Under the terms as written, the only clear way out of the clause is to stop using Meta’s products for business.