Your Facebook page now comes with a licence to your website

If your business has a Facebook page, runs Instagram ads, sells through a Meta shop, or answers customers on WhatsApp Business, you are about to agree to something new. On 30 October, Meta's updated terms for business users give it permission to crawl your website and use what it finds to train its AI.

You will not be asked to tick a box. Carrying on using Meta for business after that date counts as agreeing.

What the new terms say

The change is in Meta's Commercial Terms, which apply whenever you use a Meta product "for business or commercial purposes". Meta's own definition is wide: running ads or marketing messages, selling or listing products, developing apps, using a product catalogue, managing a Page, managing a group for business purposes, using Ads Manager or Meta Business Suite, or using Meta's measurement services, "regardless of the entity type". That covers most small businesses with any presence on Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp.

The new paragraph reads:

You authorise us (or any entity acting on our behalf) to use automated software (such as web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers and user agents) and create test credentials to access, index, cache, analyse, collect, retrieve or crawl the domains, web pages or URLs (and any content available through them) that are associated with your products or services [...] 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.

Three phrases do the work. "Associated with your products or services" means your website, not just what you post on Facebook. "Train" means AI training, and Meta's AI products count as Meta Company Products. "Create test credentials" means its crawlers may sign up for an account on your site to see what is behind the registration page.

There is no opt-out. The terms say that if you do not agree, "you may stop all access or use of our Products for business or commercial purposes."

How Meta and its critics read it

Meta told Nieman Lab, which first reported the change, that the update consolidates crawling language previously spread across other terms, that it will not change how Meta crawls, and that "content owners can still manage how their content is accessed by using robots.txt". That is the file on your website that tells automated crawlers what they may and may not visit.

Lawyers are less reassured. Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, told The Register that "the language doesn't expressly say that Meta will respect those robots.txt instructions". News publishers, who almost all have Meta business accounts, have been loudest: the News/Media Alliance called the terms "outrageous and probably illegal". Meta declined to tell Nieman Lab whether the test accounts would get past paywalls.

Nobody yet knows how a court would treat the clause. The practical position for a small business is narrower: these terms take effect on 30 October whatever the arguments, so decide what you are comfortable with before then.

The decision, for the director

You have three real choices.

Accept, and tidy what your website shows. For most businesses whose website is a shop window, AI training on the public pages costs little. The question is what else is reachable. Old pages, forgotten PDFs, staff profiles, and anything behind a free sign-up are all in scope.

Accept, and use the crawler controls. Meta publishes how to ask its AI crawlers to stay away (below). It costs nothing. It relies on Meta honouring its own published instructions, which the terms do not promise.

Stop using Meta for business. That is the only route the terms offer for saying no. For most businesses the lost customers will outweigh the content, but for some, particularly those whose website is the product, it is a fair call to make deliberately rather than by default.

Two questions are worth putting to whoever handles your contracts before 30 October. Does your website carry anything you only have a licence to use, such as stock photos, a client's case study, or a partner's material? And who in the business actually controls your Meta business account and agrees to its terms? In many small firms, the honest answer to the second is a former marketing agency.

The technical controls, for whoever runs the website

Meta's web crawler documentation names its crawlers and what each is for. The ones that matter here:

• meta-externalagent: "training foundation AI models or improving products by indexing content directly". This is the one to block if you do not want your site used for AI training.
• meta-externalads: "improving advertising and other business-related products and services".
• meta-webindexer: used to improve Meta AI's search answers and cite your site in them.
• facebookexternalhit: builds the preview card when someone shares your link. Block this and your links on Facebook lose their title and image.

To block AI training while keeping link previews, add this to your robots.txt:

User-agent: meta-externalagent
Disallow: /

Add the same pair of lines for meta-externalads or meta-webindexer if you want those out too. Meta says changes can take up to 24 hours to apply. Its documentation also says two crawlers may ignore robots.txt: facebookexternalhit during security checks, and meta-externalfetcher, which fetches pages a user has asked Meta's AI to visit.

Two further checks are worth the time:

• Look at what a free account can see. If your site lets anyone register, sign up as a stranger and look around. Customer portals, member areas, and downloads behind a free login are exactly what "test credentials" would reach.
• Check your logs after the change. Search your web server or hosting logs for the crawler names above. It tells you whether Meta was crawling you already, and whether it stops.

How Steelwise can help

Working out what your website exposes to crawlers, and what your platform accounts commit you to, is a short and practical review. Get in touch if you would like a second opinion before 30 October.

Further reading

• Meta: updated Commercial Terms, effective 30 October 2026
• Meta: web crawler documentation and robots.txt guidance

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