Meta's new business terms let it crawl linked websites and use their content for training from October 30

Meta has published a new version of its Commercial Terms, the contract that applies whenever its products are used for business, and it takes effect on October 30, 2026. The new text adds a clause that authorizes Meta to crawl the websites associated with a business's products or services and to use their content to develop and "train" its products. The current version has no such clause. A business that does not accept the change can, under the terms, only stop using Meta's products for business purposes.

What the new clause allows

The clause covers domains, web pages, and URLs "associated with" a business's products or services, along with any made available through the use of Meta's products. Meta, or anyone acting on its behalf, may use automated software, which the terms list as web scrapers, bots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents. That software may access, index, cache, analyze, collect, and crawl the content, and pull updates from it periodically.

The same sentence lets Meta create test credentials, meaning login data for accessing those pages. The terms do not say what the credentials are for. Meta may then use any content from those pages to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of its products, services, and features.

The current Commercial Terms, which apply until October 30, contain nothing about crawling, scraping, test credentials, or training. WebAiRadar checked the current text on October 16, 2026.

Who it binds and how Meta explains it

The Commercial Terms apply to any business use of Meta's products. The terms list running ads or marketing messages, selling or listing products, developing apps, using a product catalog, and managing a Page or a business group. They also name Ads Manager, Meta Business Suite, and Meta's measurement services.

Continuing to use Meta's products for business after notice of the update counts as agreement. The terms offer no opt-out from the crawling clause: a business that disagrees "may stop all access or use" of the products for business purposes.

Meta presents the update as streamlining. In its Business Help Center, the company says the Product Catalog Terms are being folded into the Commercial Terms and the Ad Creative Generative AI Terms into the Self-serve Ad Terms. Meta says this reduces overlap and makes the terms clearer. Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts told The Verge that nothing changes in how Meta uses web crawlers and that content owners can still state their preferences in robots.txt.

What robots.txt still controls

robots.txt is a text file at the root of a website that tells automated crawlers which parts of the site they may visit. Meta's crawler documentation names Meta-ExternalAgent, which crawls for purposes such as training foundation AI models, and Meta-ExternalAds, which serves advertising and other business products. A site blocks either one with a Disallow rule for its user agent, and the change can take up to 24 hours because the crawlers cache the file.

The same documentation lists two exceptions. Meta-ExternalFetcher may bypass robots.txt when it fetches a page at a user's request, and FacebookExternalHit may bypass it during security or integrity checks.

The new terms do not mention robots.txt at all, and they do not say whether the permission granted in the contract takes precedence over a block in that file. This suggests that, for now, a site owner's control over training rests on Meta's documentation and public statements rather than on the contract itself.