Meta rewrites web crawling clause in pending commercial terms – Unite.AI

Meta has revised its pending Terms of Business, which goes into effect on October 30, 2026, to remove a sentence stating that the company may use content crawled from websites linked to business accounts to train Meta Company products. The revised text was available on Meta’s legal website on 17 October 2026, after a day of public criticism of the original wording.

What the revised terms say now

The Business Terms govern your access to or use of the Meta Company Products for your business or commercial purposes. The document defines these purposes to include using ads or marketing messages, selling or listing products, developing apps, creating or using a product catalog, managing a Page, managing a Group for business purposes, using business products such as Ads Manager or Meta Business Suite, and using Meta’s measurement services.

Under the revised clause, business users authorize Meta, or any entity acting on its behalf, to use automated software – described in the text as web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers and user agents – and to create test credentials to access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve or crawl domains, web pages or URLs and any content available through them, associated with the user’s products or services or made available through the use of Meta’s products and services. Permission extends to periodically extracting updates from such domains, web pages or URLs.

As amended, the clause states that this activity is intended to provide, develop, improve, research and maintain advertising and commercial products and to maintain the integrity and security of Meta Company products. A parenthesis defines advertising and business products as business, commercial and related products that help users create and serve advertisements and other commercial content, provide users with information about their products and services, and connect them with users who may be interested in their products and services.

The Updates section of the preview states that Meta may revise the Business Terms from time to time and that your continued access or use of the Meta Company Products for business or commercial purposes after notification of an update constitutes agreement to the revised terms. Users who do not accept an update, the section states, may discontinue any access to or use of the Meta products for business or commercial purposes.

The middle of the sentence has been removed

An archived capture of the same preview page from October 16, 2026 retains the previous wording. In that version, the crawl permission ended with a reference to extracting periodic updates and followed a separate sentence: “Meta may use any content from such domains, web pages or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train and maintain the integrity of Meta Company’s products, services and features provided under these Business Terms and any applicable additional terms.”

A snapshot of the October 17, 2026 page shows that the phrase has disappeared. The authorization now moves directly from the periodic updates language to the purpose of advertising and commercial products clause, and the verb train no longer appears in the provision. Meta’s active terms page corresponds to the revised text.

The revision also shortened the section regarding the licenses that business users grant to Meta on the content they share, publish or upload. The October 16, 2026 release stated that Meta’s use of such content includes business, commercial and related services to help users create and publish ads and other commercial content, provide users with information about their products and services, and connect them with users who may be interested in their products and services; that phrase no longer appears in the current text.

The updated Preview of the Self-Serve Ads Terms, also with an effective date of October 30, 2026, contains the same revised scanning clause, with its scope limited to advertising and company products and the integrity and security of Meta Company products.

The consolidation of broader terms

Meta announced the update in a Corporate Help Center post stating that the updated versions of the Commercial Terms and Self-Serve Ads Terms will go into effect on October 30, 2026. As part of the consolidation, the Product Catalog Terms are incorporated into the Commercial Terms and the Ad Generative AI Terms are incorporated into the Self-Serve Ads Terms. Meta said the changes reduce overlap between its agreements and improve the clarity of the terms that apply to the use of its products.

The Ad Creative Generative AI Terms, effective May 6, 2024, already contained a provision about scanning. These terms permit Meta to use automated software to retrieve information from domains, web pages, or URLs provided by advertisers, and state that Meta, or any entity acting on its behalf, may access, index, cache, analyze, or crawl such URLs, and any content available through them, for use by the advertiser in connection with its advertisements. The terms page now has a notice that it will be incorporated into the Self-Serve Ads Terms on October 30, 2026.

Meta pre-review criticism and response

The original wording drew public criticism on October 16, 2026. The News/Media Alliance released a statement saying the updated terms would allow Meta to pull content from any website associated with a business account on its platforms, giving the company the ability to acquire news sites and use their content to train Meta’s AI products. The group argued that company accounts had no option to opt out of the terms unless they ceased using Meta’s products, and argued that any company with online intellectual property and a Meta company account could scrape copyrighted material, hypothetically asking whether a Meta company account held by Taylor Swift would give Meta access to scrape copyrighted media hosted on its website and whether one held by Shutterstock would give Meta the right to scrape images from that company’s website.

In the October 16, 2026 statement, News/Media Alliance President and CEO Danielle Coffey called the terms “outrageous and likely illegal,” described them as a clear abuse of the company’s market power, and said they could not be allowed to be implemented on October 30.

Also on October 16, 2026, Meta’s Andy Stone responded in a public post, writing that there were no changes to how Meta uses web crawlers and that, as always, content owners can use the robots.txt flags to indicate their preferences. Stone wrote that the update was designed to ensure that Meta can obtain accurate information about products for sale on third-party websites when making ad and content recommendations on the platform, and that it was not about scraping news sites.

Stone’s post preceded the revision of the text. The archived capture showing the railway ruling was taken as late as October 16, 2026, after his response, and the capture showing the revised wording was taken in the early hours of October 17, 2026.