Can AI Companies Use Content From Your Business Website? What Owners Should Know

What changed

Meta updated its Commercial Terms, the terms businesses accept when they use Meta's business and advertising tools, with an effective date of October 30, 2026. The first version included a paragraph letting Meta send automated crawlers to websites associated with those businesses and use what it collected to, among other things, "train" Meta products. News publishers and legal experts objected that the wording could cover scraping news sites for AI training. Around October 16 and 17, Meta revised the paragraph and removed the training wording, at least in the U.S. English version the coverage describes. Other language editions may not have changed at the same time, so check the version of the terms that applies to your account. Meta has said the terms are about its advertising and business products, that reports of plans to scrape news sites were false, and that website owners can still use robots.txt to say how their content should be accessed.

The honest nuance

The revision is narrower than it may sound. Critics, including the News/Media Alliance, have said the remaining wording still allows automated collection of content from associated websites, even without the word "train". Removing a word from a contract also does not settle wider questions about how AI companies may use public web content; those are being argued in separate court cases. And robots.txt is a request, not a lock. Well-behaved crawlers follow it, but it does not physically stop anyone, and blocking one company's crawler does nothing about the others.

Why it matters for your business

If you have put time into original content on your website, such as guides, product descriptions, photos or a blog, it is reasonable to want to know who can collect it and why. Many small businesses also accept platform terms, like Meta's, simply by running ads or a business page, without reading them. This episode shows that those terms can reach your website, not just what you post on the platform. It also shows that there are three different things worth separating: search engines indexing your site so people can find you, companies collecting content to train AI models, and AI agents visiting your site on behalf of a real customer. Blocking all of them at once can cost you visibility you actually want.

What to actually do

Open your site's robots.txt file (yourwebsite.com/robots.txt) and see what it says today, or ask whoever built your site. Decide, crawler by crawler, what you want: most businesses should keep normal search indexing open, and some may choose to block crawlers that only collect training data. If you run ads or a business account with Meta or another large platform, save a copy of the terms you accepted and note the effective date, so you can see what changes next time. Keep anything truly confidential off public pages altogether, because no setting reliably protects content once it is public.

From Kindloom Labs

Before deciding how much to share publicly, it helps to be clear on what AI tools can and cannot actually do with your information. The free Quick Read What AI Can and Can't Do is a plain-English starting point.

Sources

• Meta's new commercial terms will allow the scraping of news sites, legal experts say (Nieman Lab)
• Meta's new terms let it crawl business websites to train AI from Oct 30 (PPC Land)
• Meta revises commercial terms following concerns over AI scraping of news websites (Anadolu Agency via aNews)
• Meta backtracks after outrage over its website AI scraping clause (Android Headlines)
• Meta revises terms amid concerns over AI training on news content (Anadolu Agency via Daily Sabah)