Meta Drops 'Train' From Crawl Clause, Keeps The Crawl

Meta has removed the word "train" from the crawling clause in its new Commercial Terms, which take effect Oct. 30 — but the permission to crawl business websites stays exactly where it was.

Nieman Lab reported the revision on Oct. 17. That came two days after the outlet published legal experts' warnings that the original wording could support an argument that Meta may scrape news sites for AI training.

The timing matters. The European Publishers Council had already objected to the original wording. The UK's News Media Association condemned it in an Oct. 16 statement. Meta, in short, faced publisher pressure on two continents before the edit landed.

What changed in the clause?

The original clause said Meta "may use any content" it collected "to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of" its products, services and features.

The revised clause allows crawling "in order to provide, develop, improve, research, and maintain advertising and business products." A parenthetical defines those as products that help a business create and deliver ads and connect it with interested users. The clause keeps an integrity purpose too, now worded as maintaining "the integrity and security of" Meta's products.

Because the terms apply to any business use of Meta's products, they also cover companies that run a Facebook Page without ever buying ads. That's a wide net. One takeaway: the word "train" is gone, but nearly everything around it survived the edit.

What didn't change?

The access language is untouched. Meta can still use automated software and "create test credentials" to gather information from business websites, and it can periodically retrieve website updates. The new language contains no reference to robots.txt.

There's also an inconsistency worth flagging. As of Oct. 19, the UK English preview of Meta's Self-Serve Ad Terms still contained the old wording — the version including "train." The U.S. English version did not.

What does Meta say?

Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts told The Verge the consolidated crawling terms "only applied to our ads and business products, and we've clarified that in the terms themselves." He said the update "does not change how Meta uses web crawlers" and that "this is not about scraping news sites."

Meta also told Nieman Lab the first version "wasn't clear" that robots.txt preferences are respected. The company said the updates don't give it "new rights that supersede those preferences."

Why are lawyers still worried?

The legal experts from the first Nieman Lab report remain skeptical of the revision.

Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy, said: "I think 'develop' is broad enough to include 'train.'" He added that "business product" doesn't appear to be a defined term in the agreement.

Cornell Law School professor James Grimmelmann noted the edit does nothing to restrict the "associated with your products or services" language, which he said would let Meta scrape entire sites. He called the purposes language "still broad enough to drive a truck through."

University of Wisconsin law professor Benjamin Sobel offered context on robots.txt. It signals a site's preferences. Following those signals is voluntary, and they don't grant the site an enforceable legal right.

In plain words: one word changed, but the lawyers who flagged the original clause still see the same problems underneath it.

What should site owners monitor?

Meta revised the stated purposes, but the access grant stayed the same. Meta has pointed to robots.txt as the tool businesses can use to control crawling. Its crawler documentation lists separate crawlers — one for AI training, one for Meta AI search — so a business can block one and allow the other through robots.txt directives.

What remains unclear is whether robots.txt preferences actually limit what a business grants by accepting the terms. The revised text doesn't answer that question.

The terms take effect Oct. 30. Meta has already updated the preview once since first posting it, so publishers and site owners should re-read the clause before that date and audit how their robots.txt file handles each individual Meta crawler.