META plans to change its commercial terms to allow scraping content from websites connected to business customers for AI training and product improvement. The change, effective 30 October 2026, would let Meta and contractors access sites associated with business accounts to index pages, refresh data, and use the material to train models and enhance Meta’s services.
The article notes that “business customer” is defined broadly, covering advertisers, product sellers, developers, and users of Meta’s business tools, with many publishers and companies already holding Meta business accounts.
The terms explicitly permit automated tools—web scrapers, bots, spiders, crawlers, and similar user agents—to access domains and content and to periodically pull updates. Meta’s wording indicates it may use content from those domains to provide, develop, improve, research, train and maintain its products and features. There are concerns from the News/Media Alliance that businesses cannot opt out and that this could affect copyrighted material on sites ranging from news publishers to stock photo repositories.
The alliance argues the policy could be unlawful and abusive of market power. The article also highlights uncertainty around robots[.]txt: Meta may allow businesses to control crawler access, but the contract offers no firm promise to honour such preferences. Businesses with Meta accounts are urged to review terms before 30 October and to verify their robots[.]txt settings.