Meta Commercial Terms Revised After Criticism They Let Meta Scrape Business Websites to Train AI
Meta has revised its new Meta Commercial Terms for business accounts after critics said the first version let the company crawl businesses’ websites and use their content to train its artificial intelligence products without a contract or payment.
“We’ve heard you and want to clarify: the crawling terms we consolidated only applied to our ads and business products, and we’ve clarified that in the terms themselves,” Meta said in a statement sent Friday evening to Bay Area News Group, which first reported the criticism. The revised terms still take effect Oct. 30, according to Meta’s own terms page.
WHAT THE FIRST VERSION SAID
A version of Meta’s Commercial Terms preview archived on Oct. 16 let Meta use “automated software (such as web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents)” to access and crawl web pages “associated with your products or services.” It added: “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.”
The terms apply to anyone using Meta’s products for a business purpose, including managing a Page, running ads or using Meta Business Suite, according to the terms.
Critics said that meant a business that posts a link to its own site could open its whole website to Meta’s AI. “The text is so far reaching that any business with intellectual property online and a Meta business account could have their copyrighted material taken from them,” Danielle Coffey, president and CEO of the News/Media Alliance, said in a statement, according to Bay Area News Group.
Before the revision, Meta said, “There is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers; any suggestion to the contrary is false.” Andy Stone, Meta’s vice president of communications, wrote on social media that the update “is designed to make sure we’re able to pull accurate information about products for sale on third-party websites when making on-platform ad and content recommendations, not about scraping news sites,” the outlet reported.
WHAT THE META COMMERCIAL TERMS SAY NOW
The live version of the terms, checked Sunday on Meta’s website, still lets Meta use automated software to crawl and collect content from those web pages, but now limits the purpose to providing, developing, improving, researching and maintaining “advertising and business products,” and to “maintain the integrity and security of Meta Company Products.” The word “train” no longer appears in that section.
The terms do not mention robots.txt, the file websites use to give instructions to web crawlers. Meta has said publishers can still control crawlers through robots.txt, Bay Area News Group reported.
‘STILL A NON-STARTER’
Critics said the changes do not go far enough. “It appears as if the new language just limits what Meta is allowed to use publisher content for, but not their ability to crawl and get the content in the first place,” Sam Quigley, the News/Media Alliance’s director of communications, told the outlet. “They may have taken out training from the listed uses, but with it not being expressly ruled out, it’s still potentially on the table… This is still a non-starter as far as we’re concerned.”
Eric Goldman, a tech law professor at Santa Clara University, called the revised language “still vague and potentially overbroad.” “If Meta really plans to honor robots.txt, why not say so expressly in the (terms of service)?” he said in an email to Bay Area News Group.
Bay Area News Group noted that its parent company, MediaNews Group, is in litigation against some AI companies.
Sources: Meta Commercial Terms (live preview page and Oct. 16, 2026 archived version); Bay Area News Group via The Morning Call (Oct. 16 and 17, 2026).
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