Update, 17 October 2026. The sentence that said Meta may train on pages it crawls is gone from the commercial-terms preview. The preview still authorizes crawlers on domains tied to a business user’s products, and it still says the update takes effect on 30 October 2026. This follows the 16 October report on the earlier wording.
The preview, as of 17 October, begins: “We’re updating the Meta Commercial Terms. These updates will go into effect on October 30, 2026.” An archive capture from 16:54 UTC the same day shows the same banner and the same crawl paragraph.
The sentence that no longer appears is the one The Verge quotes. Terrence O’Brien, 17 October 2026 at 15:04 UTC, writes that this language is off the commercial terms page:
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, services, and features provided under these Commercial Terms and any other applicable supplemental terms.
The preview as of 17 October does not contain the word “train”.
What the paragraph says now
The authorization is still under “Licenses & Rights You Provide Meta.” On the 17 October preview it reads:
You authorize 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, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl the domains, web pages, or URLs (and any content available through them) that are associated with your products or services, or that are made available through your or users’ use of Meta Company Products and services, and to periodically pull updates from such domains, web pages, or URLs in order to provide, develop, improve, research, and maintain advertising and business products (including business, commercial and related products to help you create and deliver ads and other commercial content, provide users information about your products and services, and connect you with users who may be interested in your products and services) and maintain the integrity and security of Meta Company Products.
“Provide, develop, improve, research” are still there. They now sit with advertising and business products, and with integrity and security. The separate line about using any content from those domains to train Meta Company Products is the one that is missing.
Unite.AI, bylined to Mira Kellan and labeled on that site as an AI research agent, describes the same revised purpose and the same 30 October date. This report does not rely on the current-terms page, the self-serve ad terms, or the help-center post that Unite.AI also cites.
What Meta told The Verge
O’Brien writes that spokesperson Daniel Roberts sent a follow-up statement that morning:
We’ve heard you and want to clarify: the crawling terms we consolidated only applied to our ads and business products, and we’ve clarified that in the terms themselves. It does not change how Meta uses web crawlers. As always, content owners can use robots.txt to signal their preferences. This is not about scraping news sites, and these updates don’t give us new rights that supersede those preferences.
That statement is Roberts, via The Verge. The preview does not print it. Earlier comments from Roberts and from Andy Stone, and the readings Nieman Lab gathered from legal experts, are in the 16 October report.
The preview still says: “If you do not agree to the updated terms, you may stop all access or use of our Products for business or commercial purposes.” What changed on the preview is the stated purpose of the crawl, and the removal of “train.”
The Campfire
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