Starting October 30, Meta's commercial terms authorize crawling your website
Partner · Strategy, advertising and measurement
Starting October 30, 2026, Meta's new Commercial Terms authorize its crawlers to explore the websites associated with a business's products and services. They cover every business that uses Facebook or Instagram for business purposes, even without buying ads: managing a Page is enough. You accept them simply by continuing to use those products. Media reports disagree on whether the sentence letting Meta "train" its products on that content is still there: the text to go by is the one Meta presents to your business.
What the new clause says
The Commercial Terms govern how businesses use Meta's products. The current version dates from March 6, 2024. The new one applies on October 30, 2026 and adds a paragraph to Section 1, which covers the licenses and rights a business grants Meta.
In that paragraph, the business authorizes Meta (or any entity acting on its behalf) to use automated software: crawlers, bots and scrapers. Meta may also create test credentials. These tools may access, index, cache, analyze and collect the domains, web pages and URLs associated with the business's products or services. Meta may then return to them periodically to pull updates.
The text does not mention the robots.txt file. It offers no partial opt-out: a business that does not accept the new terms can only stop using Meta's products for business purposes.
Who is affected, even without ads
The clause does not cover advertisers alone. The terms define business use broadly: ads and marketing messages, selling or listing products, developing apps, managing a Page, Ads Manager and measurement tools. A business that manages its Facebook Page without ever buying an ad is covered too.
Acceptance takes no click at all. Under the section on updates, a business that keeps using Meta's products after the notice accepts the new terms.
The training sentence: versions that don't match
The original version had a second sentence. It let Meta use content from those pages to provide, develop, improve, research, "train" and maintain the integrity of its products. That sentence set off the controversy, followed by a series of conflicting reports.
| Date | What was reported |
|---|---|
| October 15 | Nieman Lab quotes three legal experts who read the clause as permission to crawl news sites and train Meta's AI on their content. |
| October 16 | Andy Stone, Meta's vice president of communications, replies on X that nothing changes in how Meta uses its web crawlers. |
| October 17 | The Verge reports that Meta removed the training sentence. According to spokesperson Daniel Roberts, the clause only ever applied to ads and business products. Meta says it clarified this in the text. |
| October 18 | PPC Land checks the UK English preview: the training sentence is still there, word for word, without the announced clarification. |
| October 19 | We check the English preview Meta publishes: the word "train" no longer appears. The paragraph names advertising, business products and the integrity and security of Meta's products. |
Two points remain open. Meta has not explained why the versions differ depending on the edition. No source says which one will apply to businesses in Canada either. Finally, removing a word from the list of uses is not the same as forbidding that use: the text checked on October 19 says nothing about it.
That is why a summary, ours included, does not replace reading the text. The text that binds you is the one Meta presents to your business in its update notice.
Meta's crawlers and the robots.txt file
Meta describes five crawlers in its webmaster documentation. Each has its own name in the robots.txt file, so you can set them one by one.
| Crawler | Use stated by Meta | robots.txt file |
|---|---|---|
| meta-externalagent | Training AI models and improving products by indexing content directly | Blocked with a Disallow rule |
| meta-externalads | Improving advertising and other business products | Blocked with a Disallow rule |
| meta-webindexer | Meta AI search result quality, which cites and links pages | Set in the file |
| facebookexternalhit | Preview of a shared link (title, description, image) | May bypass it for security or integrity checks |
| meta-externalfetcher | Fetching a page at a user's request | May bypass it |
Daniel Roberts told The Verge that content owners can still signal their preferences with robots.txt. According to him, the update gives Meta no new rights that override those preferences. The terms themselves do not say so. Meta also notes that a change to the file can take up to 24 hours to apply.
The link with product browsing on October 28
Two days earlier, on October 28, Meta turns on product browsing in Facebook and Instagram ads already running, unless the advertiser opts out. Someone who taps the ad may then see a product page inside the app before reaching your site. We explained this change and how to opt out in our note Meta will turn on product browsing in your existing ads on October 28.
Meta does not officially link the two changes. According to Andy Stone, the terms update is meant to pull accurate information about products for sale on third-party websites, for in-app ad and content recommendations. That is exactly what a product page shown inside Facebook or Instagram needs.
What we recommend
- Read the text you are shown. In Meta Business Suite, open the update notice, then the preview of the terms. Read the second paragraph of Section 1 and note whether the word "train" appears. Keep a dated copy of the page.
- Check who already visits your site. Your server logs, or Cloudflare analytics if your site runs through it, show visits from meta-externalagent and meta-externalads.
- Decide on AI training. If you do not want your pages used to train Meta's models, add a Disallow rule for meta-externalagent to your robots.txt. This crawler also indexes content for Meta's products: blocking it could reduce your pages' presence in those products.
- Let the advertising crawlers in if you advertise. Blocking meta-externalads or facebookexternalhit could hurt your link previews and the product pages in your ads.
- Check your protected areas. The clause lets Meta create test credentials. If your site has a customer area, a B2B portal or a reachable staging site, check what a test account could see there.
- Have your legal counsel read the clause if your site's content has commercial value in itself: guides, data or articles.
Setting up the AI crawlers that visit your site is part of our AI visibility (GEO) expertise.
On October 30, 2026, Meta's Commercial Terms authorize its crawlers to explore the websites associated with any business that uses its products, ads or not. The AI training sentence does not appear in every version of the text: go by the one Meta presents to your business. The robots.txt file lets you block meta-externalagent, the crawler Meta uses to train its models.
To choose which crawlers to let in, see AI crawlers: which should you allow or block on your website? To know what you own in Meta's accounts, see Ad accounts and data: who owns your digital assets?
- Meta, Meta Commercial Terms, version effective October 30, 2026, accessed October 19, 2026. Source of the automated software paragraph, the definition of business use and the section on updates.
- Meta, Meta Commercial Terms, version of March 6, 2024, accessed October 19, 2026.
- Meta for Developers, Meta Web Crawlers, accessed October 19, 2026. Source of the five crawlers, their uses and the 24-hour delay.
- Nieman Lab, Meta's new commercial terms will allow the scraping of news sites, legal experts say, October 15, 2026.
- PPC Land, Meta's new terms let it crawl business websites to train AI from Oct 30, October 16, 2026. Source of Andy Stone's reply.
- The Verge, Meta removes language that may have allowed it to scrape news sites, October 17, 2026. Source of Daniel Roberts's statement.
- PPC Land, Meta's AI training clause still in Oct 30 terms after report of removal, October 18, 2026.
- ContentGrip, Meta's AI-training terms conflict ahead of Oct. 30, October 19, 2026.
Gabriel almost always takes your first call and carries out your audit. He builds the strategy starting from your growth goal: where to put your budget, which market to test and how to connect each lead to a real sale in your CRM. He mainly leads engagements for three goals: Optimize the profitability of your digital campaigns, Develop a new market, and Generate demand and growth. With Geneviève, he also works on organic search (SEO), AI visibility (GEO) and conversion rate optimization (CRO). The sales a Google Ads or Meta Ads campaign brings in depend on the page that receives the click. He writes mainly about marketing strategy, paid advertising and measurement.
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