Meta's New Business Terms and AI Crawling: What Changes and What to Do

You may have seen headlines this week saying Meta's new business terms let it crawl your website and use what it finds for AI. A US senator is asking Meta to withdraw them, and publishers have filed complaints in Europe.

Here's the deal: nothing changes on your end today, and if you're fine with AI companies learning from your website and your Facebook or Instagram business page, you don't need to do anything at all. If you're not fine with it, there's a free fix for your website that takes about ten minutes. This post covers both.

The quick answer

1. The new terms aren't in effect yet. Meta pushed the start date from October 30 to November 20, 2026, according to Reuters.
2. If you're OK with AI training, do nothing. Keep posting, keep running your page and your ads.
3. If you'd rather Meta's AI didn't train on your website, add two lines to your site's robots.txt file that block Meta's AI crawler. Steps for WordPress, Squarespace and Wix are below.
4. Don't block everything Meta. Blocking the wrong crawler can break the link previews you get when someone shares your page on Facebook.
5. Robots.txt only covers your website. What you post on Facebook and Instagram is covered by Meta's own terms, not by anything on your site.

What Meta actually changed

Meta updated its Commercial Terms and Self-Serve Ad Terms, the contract every business agrees to when it runs a Facebook or Instagram page, a shop or ads. They were due to start on October 30.

The part people are upset about is one clause in Meta's preview of the new terms. It lets Meta, or anyone working for it, use automated software (crawlers, programs that read web pages automatically) to access, index, collect and crawl domains and pages associated with your business, plus pages "made available through your or users' use" of Meta's products, and to pull updates from them over time. The stated purposes are Meta's advertising and business products and the security of its platforms. That's not just the link in your bio: the National Law Review's summary points out it can reach sites linked from your page, your ad account and your product catalog.

Reuters and Search Engine Journal report that Meta removed an explicit reference to AI training from the clause, and the current English preview doesn't mention training. Critics say the wording is still broad enough to allow AI use.

Then, on October 23:

• Meta delayed the start date to November 20, saying it wanted time to explain the changes to partners (Reuters).
• Senator Marsha Blackburn asked Meta to withdraw the terms, saying they could harm American creators and businesses (Reuters, via US News).
• Meta pushed back. Meta told Reuters the terms apply only to its ads and business products, that it isn't changing how it uses web crawlers, and that content owners "will still be able to use robots.txt to signal preferences." A Meta spokesperson told Search Engine Journal the delay gives it time to explain what's changing and what's not, including how it uses web crawlers.

What we don't know yet: the final wording, and exactly how Meta will treat robots.txt under the new terms. The preview doesn't mention robots.txt. We'll update this post when Meta says more.

Do you need to do anything?

Probably not. Ask yourself one question: do you mind if AI models learn from your public website and business page?

A lot of small businesses don't. Your website exists so people can find you, and AI tools are one more place people look. If that's you, carry on. There's nothing to sign, opt into or change.

If it does bother you, the website part is easy to handle. But first, here's why some businesses decide it's worth blocking.

Why AI training on your site can hurt a small business

"Training" means an AI company copies huge amounts of text and images from the web and feeds them into a model, so the model learns to write answers that sound like what it read. Your website can be part of that pile. For most small businesses that's harmless. For some, it costs something real. Here's how.

Your know-how gets given away for free. Say you're a pool company and you wrote a detailed guide to fixing green water. That guide is there to bring people to your site, where they see you're the expert and call you. If an AI tool has learned from it, it can hand that same advice to someone directly, in its own words, with no mention of you. The person gets the answer. You get no visit, no phone call, no credit.

You can't take it back. Blocking a crawler stops it from collecting your pages from now on. It doesn't remove anything that was already collected, and there's no button to pull your content out of a model that's already trained. That's why it's worth deciding now rather than later.

Old information can outlive your website. You update your prices, drop a service or change your hours. Your website is fixed the same day, but a model trained on the old version doesn't know that. An AI answer can still repeat what your site said a year ago, and the customer who believes it is annoyed at you, not the AI.

Your edge becomes everyone's. If what sets you apart is how you explain things (your process, your checklists, your way of quoting a job), training spreads that across every answer the AI gives, including answers to your competitors' customers. Your best content stops being yours alone.

Photos and paid content. Photos you paid a photographer for, licensed stock images, or content behind a members area or course can be swept up if they're reachable. Your license with the photographer may not cover that use, and you can't control what happens next.

It's not your call once it's out. You agreed to Meta's terms to run a page or ads. You didn't agree to have your website feed someone's AI product, and you won't be paid or asked. Some owners block on principle, and that's a fair reason too.

Who should block and who shouldn't bother

Be honest about what your website does for you.

• Probably block if your content is the product or the reason people hire you: detailed how-to guides, recipes, original research, training material, photography, design work, or anything you'd charge for.
• Probably don't bother if your website is mainly a digital business card: who you are, what you do, your service area, your phone number. There's little to give away, and being known to AI tools can help people find you.

Blocking Meta's training crawler doesn't hide you from Google, and it doesn't stop Meta's AI search crawler from finding and linking to you (more on that below). It only tells Meta's training crawler to stay out.

Meta has several crawlers, and only one is for AI training

This is the part to get right. Meta's own crawler page lists five, and they do different jobs:

• Meta-ExternalAgent crawls for training AI models and for indexing content to improve Meta's products. This is the one to block if you don't want AI training.
• facebookexternalhit builds the link preview (title, picture, description) when someone shares your page on Facebook, Instagram or Messenger. Leave this alone. Block it and your shared links show up bare.
• Meta-ExternalFetcher fetches a page because a person asked Meta's AI to look at it. Meta says it may not follow robots.txt, since a human started the request.
• Meta-WebIndexer helps Meta AI find and link to your content in its answers. Blocking it may keep you out of those answers.
• Meta-ExternalAds crawls for Meta's ads and business products. If you run Meta ads or a product catalog, ask whoever manages them before you block this one.

Robots.txt is a plain text file at the root of your website (yourbusiness.com/robots.txt) that tells crawlers what they may visit. Well-behaved crawlers follow it. It's a request, not a lock, but it's the signal Meta itself says to use.

The two lines to add

To block Meta's AI training crawler from your whole site, add this to your robots.txt:

User-agent: meta-externalagent
Disallow: /

Keep everything that's already in the file. Add these lines at the end, on their own, with a blank line before them. Don't add a line that blocks every crawler (User-agent: * with Disallow: /). That would take you out of Google too.

If you also want to stop other AI companies from training on your site, the same pattern works for their crawlers. Our post on whether to block AI bots lists which ones are for training and which ones send you customers.

Here's how to add it on the three platforms we see most.

WordPress

WordPress builds a basic robots.txt for you automatically, so you usually don't have a file to open. The easiest way to change it is through your SEO plugin. Screen names change between versions, so these are as of October 2026:

1. Yoast SEO: go to Yoast SEO > Tools > File Editor. If there's no robots.txt yet, select Create robots.txt file. If you don't see File Editor, file editing is turned off on your site (Yoast's guide).
2. Rank Math: turn on Advanced Mode first, then go to Rank Math SEO > General Settings > Edit robots.txt (Rank Math's guide).
3. All in One SEO: go to All in One SEO > Tools > Robots.txt Editor and switch on Enable Custom Robots.txt (AIOSEO's guide).
4. Paste the two lines at the end of what's already there and save.
5. No SEO plugin? Your host's file manager (in cPanel or similar) lets you create a plain text file called robots.txt in your site's main folder. Ask your host or web person if you're not sure which folder that is.

One catch: if a real robots.txt file already exists in that folder, it wins over the one WordPress and your plugin generate. If your changes don't show up, that's usually why. Rank Math, for example, says to delete the physical file so its editor can take over.

Squarespace

Squarespace doesn't let you edit robots.txt; every Squarespace site shares the same file. It has a built-in switch instead, per Squarespace's help page:

1. Open the Settings panel and go to Crawlers.
2. Check Block known artificial intelligence crawlers, and save. It's unchecked by default.

That box blocks a list of AI crawlers Squarespace maintains, and Meta-ExternalAgent is on it. It doesn't touch facebookexternalhit, so your link previews keep working. You can't add your own lines, but for Meta's training crawler you don't need to.

Wix

Wix has a robots.txt editor. Per Wix's help page:

1. In your site's dashboard, go to SEO & GEO, scroll to Tools and settings and select Robots.txt Editor. (Older accounts may call it the SEO Dashboard.)
2. Select View File.
3. Add the two lines below what's already there.
4. Select Save Changes, then Save.

Wix flags this as an advanced feature and says its support team can't help with changes you make. If something goes wrong, the same screen has a Reset to Default button.

Check that it worked

Open yourbusiness.com/robots.txt in a browser. You should see:

• The two Meta lines.
• No Disallow: / under User-agent: * (that would block Google).
• No line blocking facebookexternalhit.

That's it. Crawlers check robots.txt regularly, so it can take a day or so for them to notice.

What about your Facebook and Instagram page?

Robots.txt only controls your website. Posts, photos and reviews on your Facebook or Instagram business page live on Meta's platform, under Meta's terms. Nothing you put on your website changes that.

If you're comfortable with Meta using that content, again, no action needed. If you're not, the practical move is to think about what you post there, and keep your original guides, photos and detailed content on your own website, where you control the rules.

When to call someone

You don't need help to add two lines to a text file. But call someone if:

• Your robots.txt already has a lot in it and you're not sure what's safe to touch.
• You run Meta ads or a Shopify or WooCommerce catalog, and you're weighing whether to block Meta's ads crawler.
• You want a plan for AI crawlers across the board, not just Meta's.

Get in touch, or see what our SEO service covers.

Related reading

• Should My Small Business Block AI Bots From Its Website?
• What Is llms.txt, and Does My Business Website Need One?
• Is Google's AI Overview Stealing My Website Traffic?