Meta's updated Commercial Terms, effective Oct. 30, 2026, authorize Meta, or anyone acting for it, to use bots and crawlers to "access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl" sites tied to your products or services. The next sentence lets Meta use that content to train its products.

What the terms say

The text covers any business or commercial use of Meta's products, including managing a Page, running ads, and using Business Suite or catalogs. It reaches web addresses tied to your products or services, plus pages reached through your or your users' use of Meta's products, and lets Meta pull updates periodically.

The new language also lets Meta create test credentials to get in. Continuing to use Meta's business products after notice counts as acceptance.

The terms do not mention robots.txt.

What lawyers and Meta say

That silence is where the dispute sits. Nieman Lab, which first reported the change, asked three legal experts to read it. Their view, which is interpretation rather than text, is that Meta could argue the terms outrank robots.txt blocks. One said it is unclear a court would enforce them. Meta declined to say whether those credentials would reach paywalled content. Its spokesperson told the outlet that the update consolidates crawling language previously spread across several terms and does not change how Meta crawls.

What you can do

Meta's crawler documentation says to block a crawler by adding a disallow for it in robots.txt. It names these user agents:

  • meta-externalagent: crawls for uses such as training foundation AI models or indexing content.
  • meta-externalads: crawls to improve advertising and other business products and services.
  • meta-webindexer: improves Meta AI search; Meta says allowing it helps it cite and link to your content.

A site-wide block looks like this:

User-agent: meta-externalagent
Disallow: /

Meta adds two limits. Meta-ExternalFetcher, which fetches links at a user's request, may bypass robots.txt, and so may FacebookExternalHit during security checks, Meta says. Changes can take up to 24 hours to apply.

The only other route is to stop using Meta's business products, which means giving up the Page, ads and Business Suite tools.

Why it matters

Our assessment: the trade-off is uneven. A robots.txt block costs nothing but is untested against these terms. The alternative costs the audience and ad reach a Page provides.

The wording is not limited to publishers. Any shop, creator or club that uses a Page for business or commercial purposes and has a website falls inside it.