TLDR
Meta's updated Commercial Terms, taking effect 30 October 2026, explicitly permit crawling and AI training on any domain linked to a business account, with no partial opt-out for Australian users. Nearly 30 hours after one report said the training clause had been removed, it remained intact in Meta's UK-English preview.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
What the clause says
Meta's updated Commercial Terms take effect on 30 October 2026. Section 1 authorises Meta to crawl domains, web pages and URLs associated with a business's products or services, then says: "Meta may use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train" its products.[1] Nieman Lab, which first reported the change on 15 October, put the wording to legal experts.
"For news publishers, this clearly represents permission to Meta to train AI on any content from their sites," said James Grimmelmann, professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School. Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy, was more cautious about the courts but not about the risk: "It's not clear whether a court would enforce this, but publishers should assume that it would be enforceable."[1]
There is no opt-out clause. Businesses that keep using Meta's commercial products after notice accept the terms, and the alternative the terms offer is that "you may stop all access or use of our Products."[3]
Update: what the revised wording says
Search Engine Journal compared the revised US English text on 19 October. "Train" is gone from the list of purposes: crawling is now permitted "in order to provide, develop, improve, research, and maintain advertising and business products", and the permission to crawl websites associated with a business's products or services stays. The clause also now covers any business use of Meta's products, including a company that runs a Facebook Page without buying ads. The UK English preview still carried the original "may use any content" sentence that day.[4]
The lawyers aren't convinced the change narrows much. Matt Topic told SEJ that "develop" is broad enough to include training, and Cornell's James Grimmelmann called the purposes language still broad. Meta has not said which version Australian businesses will be bound by on 30 October, so the clause is worth rechecking before then.[4]
A removal that hasn't reached every version
On 17 October The Verge reported that the training sentence no longer appeared on the commercial terms page. Andy Stone, Meta's vice president of communications, said: "There is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers; any suggestion to the contrary is false." Spokesperson Daniel Roberts said the crawling terms "only applied to our ads and business products, and we've clarified that in the terms themselves."[2]
PPC Land checked Meta's UK English preview of the terms on 18 October, nearly 30 hours after The Verge's report, and found the training sentence still there word for word, with no ads-only limitation and no mention of robots.txt.[2] On 19 October Mumbrella reported that Meta had removed the clause in some jurisdictions but that it remains in place in Australia. Meta had not responded to Mumbrella's request for comment at publication.[3]
| Date (2026) | What happened |
|---|---|
| Early October | Meta notifies business users of updated Commercial Terms |
| 15 October | Nieman Lab reports legal experts' reading of the training clause |
| 17 October | The Verge reports the training sentence no longer appears on the terms page |
| 18 October | PPC Land finds the sentence still in Meta's UK English preview |
| 19 October | Mumbrella reports the clause remains in place in Australia |
| 30 October | Updated terms take effect |
What it means for Australian businesses
"Meta is expanding the scope of their commercial terms to allow them to crawl more of your website, content and data," said Paul Hewett, chief executive of In Marketing We Trust. Hewett opposed the News Media Bargaining Code but told Mumbrella he is reconsidering, arguing the issue reaches well beyond news publishers to any Australian business whose content can be used to train and monetise AI.[3]
Meta's answer for content owners is robots.txt. It told Nieman Lab the update consolidates crawling language that was previously scattered across other terms and "will not change how Meta crawls publishers in the future," and that "content owners can still manage how their content is accessed by using robots.txt."[1] Hewett compared that safeguard to a sign in a pub that nobody enforces.[3] PPC Land notes that Meta's crawler, Meta-ExternalAgent, uses a single robots.txt token for both AI training and indexing.[2]
The terms apply from 30 October, and advertisers, agencies and publishers running Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp business accounts accept them simply by carrying on.
SOURCES & CITATIONS
- Nieman Lab: Meta's new commercial terms will allow the scraping of news sites, legal experts say
- PPC Land: Meta's AI training clause still in Oct 30 terms after report of removal
- Meta Drops Training From Its Crawl Clause And Keeps The Crawl, Search Engine Journal
- Mumbrella: 'Pillaged': Meta's new commercial terms deepen AI scraping concerns
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What does Meta's updated Commercial Terms clause say about AI training?
Can Australian businesses opt out of the AI training clause?
Was the training clause removed from Meta's terms?
Does robots.txt protect a business from Meta's crawlers?
Xaviery Malinao writes for Prompt the Market on how brands and agencies are adapting to answer engines, drawing on Bushnote's work with clients across search, AI search and content.
