Meta’s current preview says its revised Commercial Terms will take effect on November 20, 2026. The terms would authorize automated crawling of certain websites connected to business activity on Meta, for advertising and business-product purposes. The crawling clause does not expressly name AI training.
Which websites and tools does the clause cover?
The clause applies to business or commercial use of Meta Company Products, such as advertising, selling or listing products, managing a Page, or using Meta Business Suite. It covers domains, web pages, and URLs associated with a business’s products or services, as well as material made available through a business’s or users’ use of Meta products and services.
Meta’s Commercial Terms preview says businesses authorize Meta, or entities acting on its behalf, to use automated software such as web scrapers, bots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents. The tools may access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl the covered pages and periodically pull updates. A crawler is software that automatically visits web pages and retrieves information from them.
The stated purposes are to provide, develop, improve, research, and maintain advertising and business products, and to maintain the integrity and security of Meta products. A separate provision covers content shared, posted, or uploaded on or in connection with Meta products. That license lets Meta use that content to provide, develop, improve, research, and maintain its products; it is distinct from the website-crawling permission.
Could “develop” include AI training?
The clause does not expressly say “train.” Attorney Matt Topic argued that “develop” could be broad enough to include training, while Cornell Law professor James Grimmelmann said the retained language about sites associated with a business’s products or services could permit broad site scraping. The Verge reported their views on October 22, 2026; they are interpretations of the wording, not terms the clause states explicitly.
Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts told The Verge that website owners can use robots.txt to signal their preferences and that the update does not give Meta new rights overriding those preferences. The terms’ crawling clause does not mention robots.txt.
When do the terms take effect, and what about blocking a crawler?
Meta’s preview lists November 20, 2026 as the effective date. Meta extended the earlier October 30 schedule by three weeks.
The crawling clause does not state that blocking a crawler triggers a penalty or shutdown for a Facebook or Instagram page. Roberts’s statement about robots.txt expresses Meta’s position on site-owner preferences; it does not specify how every enforcement situation would be handled.
