If you run a business account on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Messenger, Meta’s new commercial terms take effect on October 30th, and they say you authorize Meta to crawl the websites “associated” with your products or services. Meta may then use that content to “develop, improve, research” and “train” its AI products. Agreeing to the terms is the price of using the platforms for business: the terms say businesses that do not agree “may stop all access or use of our Products for business or commercial purposes.”
The wording is broad. It covers automated software such as scrapers, bots, crawlers and user agents, and it lets Meta access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve or crawl those domains, pages and URLs, plus anything reachable through them, and pull updates periodically.
The part that matters for your site is robots.txt, a small file that tells crawlers what they may and may not take. Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts says content owners can still use robots.txt flags to indicate their preferences, and that there is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers. Legal experts speaking to Nieman Lab disagree about the effect, saying the new terms could let Meta argue its commercial terms supersede other blocking instructions, robots.txt included.
Three things to do before October 30th
- Write down which domains are tied to your business accounts and your ad campaigns. Those are the ones the clause reaches.
- Check what your robots.txt currently says, and set it to the preference you actually want.
- If your content is licensed to anyone, or you sell access to it, have whoever handles your contracts read the new terms against them.
One caveat. On October 17th Meta updated the terms again and said “the crawling terms we consolidated only applied to our ads and business products, and we’ve clarified that in the terms themselves.” Andy Stone, Meta’s vice president of communications, says the update is meant to pull accurate product information from third party sites for ad and content recommendations, not to scrape news sites. What binds you is the text you accept, not the explanation around it, so read the version that is live when you click agree.
