Meta has revised its pending Commercial Terms, which take effect October 30, 2026, to remove a sentence stating that the company could use content crawled from websites tied to business accounts to train Meta Company Products. The revised text was in place on Meta’s legal website by October 17, 2026, after a day of public criticism of the original wording.
What the Revised Terms Now Say
The Commercial Terms govern access to or use of Meta Company Products for business or commercial purposes. The document defines those 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 in order to access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl the domains, web pages, or URLs, and any content available through them, that are associated with the user’s products or services or made available through use of Meta’s products and services. The authorization extends to periodically pulling updates from those domains, web pages, or URLs.
As revised, the clause states that this activity is in order to provide, develop, improve, research, and maintain advertising and business products, and to maintain the integrity and security of Meta Company Products. A parenthetical defines advertising and business products as including business, commercial, and related products that help users create and deliver ads and other commercial content, provide users information about their products and services, and connect them with users who may be interested in their products and services.
The preview’s Updates section states that Meta may revise the Commercial Terms from time to time and that continued access or use of Meta Company Products for business or commercial purposes after notice of an update constitutes agreement to the revised terms. Users who do not agree to an update, the section states, may stop all access or use of Meta’s products for business or commercial purposes.
The Sentence Meta Removed
An archived capture of the same preview page from October 16, 2026 preserves the earlier wording. In that version, the crawling authorization ended with the reference to pulling periodic updates, and a separate sentence followed: “Meta may use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of, the Meta Company Products, services, and features provided under these Commercial Terms and any other applicable supplemental terms.”
A capture of the page from October 17, 2026 shows the sentence gone. The authorization now runs directly from the periodic-updates language into the advertising-and-business-products purpose clause, and the verb train no longer appears in the provision. Meta’s live terms page matches the revised text.
The revision also shortened the section covering the licenses that business users grant Meta over content they share, post, or upload. The October 16, 2026 version stated that Meta’s use of such content included business, commercial, and related services to help users create and deliver ads and other commercial content, provide users information about their products and services, and connect them with users who may be interested in their products and services; that sentence no longer appears in the current text.
The updated Self-Serve Ad Terms preview, also dated to take effect October 30, 2026, carries the same revised crawling clause, with its purpose limited to advertising and business products and to the integrity and security of Meta Company Products.
The Broader Terms Consolidation
Meta announced the update in a Business Help Center post stating that updated versions of the Commercial Terms and the Self-Serve Ad Terms will take effect on October 30, 2026. Under the consolidation, the Product Catalog Terms are incorporated into the Commercial Terms, and the Ad Creative Generative AI Terms are incorporated into the Self-Serve Ad 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, in effect since May 6, 2024, already contained a crawling provision. Those terms allow Meta to use automated software to retrieve information from domains, webpages, or URLs that advertisers provide, and state that Meta, or any entity acting on its behalf, may access, index, cache, analyze, or crawl those URLs, and any content available through them, for the advertiser’s use in connection with its ads. The page for those terms now carries a notice that they are being incorporated into the Self-Serve Ad Terms on October 30, 2026.
Criticism and Meta’s Pre-Revision Response
The original wording drew public criticism on October 16, 2026. The News/Media Alliance issued a statement saying the updated terms would allow Meta to scrape content from any website associated with a business account on its platforms, giving the company the ability to scrape news sites and use their content to train Meta’s AI products. The group said business accounts had no option to opt out of the terms short of ceasing to use Meta’s products, and argued that any business with intellectual property online and a Meta business account could have copyrighted material taken, asking hypothetically whether a Meta business account held by Taylor Swift would give Meta access to scrape copyrighted media hosted on her 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 probably 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 was no change to how Meta uses web crawlers and that, as always, content owners can use robots.txt flags to indicate their preferences. Stone wrote that the update was designed to ensure Meta can pull accurate information about products for sale on third-party websites when making on-platform ad and content recommendations, and that it was not about scraping news sites.
Stone’s post preceded the text revision. The archived capture showing the train sentence was taken later on October 16, 2026, after his response, and the capture showing the revised wording was taken in the early hours of October 17, 2026.
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