Meta’s updated Commercial Terms, which take effect on October 30, 2026, add a clause authorising the company to crawl the websites of businesses that use its products. The terms apply to any business use of Meta’s products, from running ads to managing a Facebook Page, and continued use counts as agreement.
The new paragraph says a business authorises Meta, or any entity acting on its behalf, to use automated software — the terms list scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers and user agents — and to create test credentials to access, index, cache and crawl the domains, pages and URLs associated with its products or services, and to periodically pull updates from them. Meta may use the content it collects to provide, develop, improve, research and train its products. Meta’s existing ad terms already allowed crawling of advertisers’ websites; the October update extends similar rights to businesses that never buy ads. The terms offer no opt-out other than stopping all business use of Meta’s products, and they do not mention robots.txt. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone has disputed the framing of the change, saying it is meant to let Meta pull accurate information about products sold on third-party websites for ad and content recommendations, and that it is “not about scraping news sites.”
For advertisers and publishers, the practical questions land before October 30: which Meta crawlers appear in server logs, what a Page or product listing implicitly licenses, and whether site owners treat the clause as a reason to tighten crawler rules. It is another front in the fight over who controls automated access to the open web, arriving as platforms also tighten control inside their own ad systems — the same week, for example, that Google Ads automated promotions went live with eligible advertisers opted in. Businesses that rely on Meta for reach now have to weigh that reach against a broad, take-it-or-leave-it crawling licence.
Source: Search Engine Journal and PPC Land, reporting on Meta’s updated Commercial Terms
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