Meta Commercial Terms on Scraping Business Websites

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Written automatically from the Oesnada stories in this timeline. Every number is checked against them. The numbers in brackets link to those stories.

Timeline

1. Also on our radar22 October 2026Meta's AI could still scrape news sites, legal experts sayThe Verge

   Meta has edited its new business terms to remove wording that suggested it could freely train its AI models on content from news sites such as The Verge. Legal experts say the changes do not go far enough. The terms, which take effect October 30th, originally said Meta "may use any content" from websites associated with a business account to "develop, research" and "train" its products. After strong backlash from the publishing industry, Meta removed the language about training its products with scraped content. Experts told Nieman Lab that the revised terms still leave room for Meta to scrape entire sites. James Grimmelmann, a Cornell Law School professor of digital and information law, said the edits do nothing to limit the phrase "associated with your products or services," which would let Meta scrape whole sites. Earlier, experts had warned that Meta could argue its commercial terms override blocking instructions such as the robots.txt file, which has historically told scrapers, including search engines like Google, what they may crawl. Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy, pointed out that the revised version still lets Meta use scraped content to develop any "business product." He noted that the term does not appear to be defined, that Meta is presumably building AI business products, and that "develop" seems broad enough to include "train." Meta has maintained that the new terms are not designed to scrape news content for free.

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2. Also on our radar17 October 2026Meta Removes Terms Language on Scraping Business Account Websites, Says ItThe Verge

   Meta has removed a passage from its commercial terms that critics read as permission to use content from websites, including news sites, to train its AI. The deleted text said Meta could use content from domains, web pages or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research and train its products and services. The change, reported by The Verge, follows backlash and an earlier revision to the terms. The wording mattered because Nieman Lab and James Grimmelmann, a Cornell professor of digital and information law, interpreted it as an attempt to let Meta use scraped web content for AI training at no cost and override a site's robots.txt file. That file is how website owners tell automated crawlers what they may or may not collect. Meta communications chief Andy Stone and spokesperson Daniel Roberts initially said nothing had changed in how Meta uses web crawlers and called any suggestion otherwise false. In a follow-up statement to The Verge, Roberts said the consolidated crawling terms applied only to Meta's ads and business products, and that the terms now say so explicitly. He said the update does not change how Meta uses web crawlers, that content owners can still use robots.txt to signal their preferences, and that the revisions give Meta no new rights to override them. He also said the matter is not about scraping news sites.

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3. 15 October 2026MajorNieman Lab

   Meta's New Terms Allow Scraping of Business-Linked Websites with No Opt-Out

   Meta has updated its commercial terms of service to allow automated software, such as web crawlers, to scrape content from websites linked to its business accounts.

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Oesnada, "Meta Commercial Terms on Scraping Business Websites", https://oesnada.com/storylines/meta-commercial-terms-on-scraping-business-websites, accessed 22 October 2026.