Meta has paused the business terms that let it crawl your website, a rare case of the fine print blinking first
By Brett Gavaghan, Founder of Adaptd ·
Meta's new business terms would have let it crawl websites linked to any business account. After a publisher backlash, a Norwegian court order and a UK investigation, the old terms stay in place for now.
The short version
- Meta has postponed new business terms that would have let it crawl websites linked to business accounts.
- The terms were due on 30 October and would have covered businesses running ads or using Meta Business Suite.
- Nothing changes for now, so check which pages on your site you'd want kept away from crawlers.
Nobody reads the terms when Facebook asks them to click Accept. This time, enough people did.
What changed in Meta's business terms?
Meta's new business terms would have let it use automated software to "index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl" websites linked to a business account. They were due to start on 30 October 2026, but Meta said on 29 October that its existing terms stay in place for now.
A Norwegian court had granted a temporary injunction at the request of 180 media companies, and the UK's competition regulator opened an investigation on 30 October. Meta also removed the word "train" from the draft after Nieman Lab reported that the wording could cover AI training.
Does it affect Australian businesses?
Australian businesses would have been covered, because the terms applied to business and commercial use of Meta's products, including running ads, selling products and using Meta Business Suite. SmartCompany reported that the only stated alternative was to stop using Meta's products for business.
Meta says the update is about pulling accurate product information from third-party websites for ads and recommendations, not scraping news sites, and that its use of web crawlers isn't changing. Meta also says businesses can still block its crawlers through their website settings.
What should your business do about it?
Your business doesn't need to do anything today, because the old terms still apply. Meta says it won't change policy without full consultation with industry groups, so my guess is a new version turns up rather than the idea going away.
My advice: use the pause. Ask whoever runs your website which pages are public and whether anything sits there that you'd rather not see in someone else's system, such as price lists, client documents or old staff pages. Assume anything public can be read. If leaving Facebook isn't realistic, and for most small businesses it isn't, that website check is the part you control.
It takes about as long as reading the terms, and it's a lot more fun.
Wondering what this means for your business?
That's exactly what the discovery call is for.