Meta's New Commercial Terms Let It Crawl Your Website From October 30

October 16, 2026. Meta's updated Commercial Terms take effect on October 30, 2026. From that date, any business that uses Meta's products for ads, marketing messages, a product catalogue, a Page, a business group, Ads Manager, Meta Business Suite or measurement authorizes Meta to crawl the websites associated with its products or services and to use what it collects to train Meta's products. The terms offer no opt-out: a business that does not agree may stop using Meta's products for business purposes. Meta told Nieman Lab that robots.txt still controls access, so the decision for a store, agency or local service business is which of Meta's five documented crawlers to let in before October 30.

What changes in Meta's terms on October 30

1. A crawling clause, new to the Commercial Terms. The updated text authorizes Meta, or anyone acting for it, to use scrapers, bots, crawlers and user agents to access, index, cache, analyse, collect and crawl the domains, pages and URLs associated with your products or services, plus URLs made available through your or your users' use of Meta products, and to pull updates from them periodically. The version in force since March 6, 2024 contains no crawling language.
2. Training is named. Meta may use any content from those URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train and maintain the integrity of its products, services and features.
3. Test credentials. The same clause lets Meta create test credentials to reach those pages. Meta has not said what that covers.
4. A wider definition of business use. The 2024 version listed ads, selling products, developing apps, managing a Page or a business group, and measurement. The new one adds marketing messages, listing products, creating or using a product catalogue, and using any business product such as Ads Manager or Meta Business Suite.
5. A broader content licence. You now warrant that you hold the rights to let Meta create derivative works of the content you or your agency post. The 2024 text covered displaying, distributing and delivering it.
6. AI-made content is your responsibility. A new AI features clause says Meta's AI tools may make mistakes, that you are solely responsible for the content they help create, and that you must not remove AI watermarks or content-authenticating metadata. The updated Self-serve Ad Terms, effective the same day, repeat both the AI clause and the crawling clause.

The new version also names five sets of supplemental terms it incorporates: the Self-serve Ad Terms, the Business Tools Terms behind the Meta Pixel and Conversions API, the Seller Agreement, the terms for Meta Business Agents and the terms for the Meta AI business assistant in Ads Manager and Business Suite.

Nieman Lab reported the change on October 15 after three legal experts reviewed the terms. They said the clause could be read as permission to scrape news sites and train AI on them, and that Meta could argue the contract outranks robots.txt. A Meta spokesperson told the outlet that the update gathers crawling language previously spread across other terms, that it will not change how Meta crawls publishers, and that content owners can still manage access with robots.txt. Meta did not say whether test credentials would get past paywalls.

Advertisers already agreed to most of this

The Self-serve Ad Terms in force today already say that by placing an ad order you let Meta access, index, cache, analyse or crawl the content on your domains to develop and improve advertising and business products, and for research and training. If you have run Meta ads, crawling for training was already in your contract. What is new on October 30 is the reach. A business that only manages a Page, sends marketing messages or syncs a catalogue, and has never placed an ad order, gives the same permission, and the commercial version adds test credentials and periodic pulls.

Meta's five crawlers and what robots.txt does to each

Meta's web crawler documentation, last updated May 21, 2026, lists five user agents and says you block each one with a disallow rule for that crawler in robots.txt. It also says its crawlers may cache robots.txt for up to 24 hours, and that two of them may bypass the file.

What it means for stores, agencies and service businesses

1. Plan as if your whole site is in scope. The terms do not define "associated with", so assume they reach your domain, landing pages, product pages, blog and any URL that appears in your ads, your catalogue or posts your customers share.
2. Catalogue sellers are covered without ads. A Shopify store that syncs products to a Meta catalogue is creating or using a product catalogue, one of the newly listed business uses, so its product descriptions, prices and reviews fall under the clause from October 30.
3. A login wall is not a plan. Test credentials are in the text and Meta has not said where it would use them. Treat wholesale price lists, member areas and client portals as reachable unless you control access some other way.
4. Blocking has a cost. Meta says allowing meta-webindexer helps Meta AI cite and link your content, so blocking it works against being named in Meta AI answers. Blocking facebookexternalhit can leave your shared links without a preview, because Meta's docs say Facebook cannot display content its crawler cannot fetch. Most businesses that only want to stay out of model training need to refuse meta-externalagent and nothing else.
5. Agencies bind their clients. The terms make anyone who uses Meta on a client's behalf responsible for the client following them, and the agency represents that it has authority to bind that client. If you run Pages or ads for clients, tell them before October 30.

What to do before October 30

1. Decide crawler by crawler. To stay out of Meta's model training while keeping link previews and Meta AI citations, add a group for User-agent: meta-externalagent with Disallow: / to robots.txt, and leave facebookexternalhit and meta-webindexer allowed. If you advertise, leave meta-externalads alone, because Meta does not say what blocking it changes.
2. Publish the change by October 29. Meta's crawlers can cache robots.txt for up to 24 hours.
3. Keep a record. Save a dated copy of robots.txt and filter your server logs for the five user agents, so you can show what you asked for and see whether meta-externalagent keeps fetching after the change.
4. Audit gated pages. Move anything you would not want in a training set out of reach of a simple account login.
5. Review AI-made ads before they run. Under the new AI clause, a mistake in creative generated by Meta's tools is yours, and removing its watermark or metadata breaches the terms.

Meta now runs one crawler for model training and another for its AI answers, the same split OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Perplexity use, and our guide to blocking AI crawlers maps it for those four. If you want Meta AI, ChatGPT and Gemini to name your business, our AI search optimization team works on the entity fixes, citable pages and mentions that drive AI citations. Stores selling through a Meta catalogue can see how Meta's shopping agent reaches them in Meta Muse explained for businesses, and our Shopify store team can check what your catalogue and product pages expose.