Meta's new Commercial Terms let it crawl advertiser websites and use the content to train AI, from Oct 30
What changed
The revised Meta Commercial Terms take effect October 30, 2026. A new clause lets Meta use crawlers and "test credentials" to access sites associated with a business's products or services, pull updates periodically, and use that content to "provide, develop, improve, research, train" Meta products. You accept by continuing to use Meta for business; there is no partial opt-out. Meta says the change is about reading accurate product info for ad and content recommendations, and that robots.txt preferences still apply.
What to do
Get legal to read the new terms before Oct 30. Review robots.txt rules for Meta's crawlers (Meta-ExternalAgent, Meta-WebIndexer) and decide which pages, such as gated, wholesale or member content, you are comfortable having crawled.
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