On Oct. 17, 2026 Meta announced a change to its commercial terms. The clause that said the company could use content from any domain to "provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain" its products was taken down. The wording had been interpreted by experts as a blanket right to scrape sites, including news outlets, for free. Meta says the removal only clarifies that the clause applied to its ad‑related products and does not affect how its web crawlers operate.
What the change means
The update was made after criticism from researchers and legal scholars who argued the original language overrode a site’s robots.txt file—a standard way for sites to tell crawlers what they can and cannot copy. Meta’s communications team reiterated that content owners can still use robots.txt to set preferences, and that the company is not gaining new rights to scrape news sites.
Why it matters
For news publishers, the removal means Meta no longer claims a broad right to copy their articles for AI training without permission. However, Meta still says its crawlers follow robots.txt, so sites must continue to use that file to control access. It remains unclear whether Meta will change how it actually gathers data behind the scenes.
