Meta drops 'train' from its commercial terms. Crawl rights stay.

Meta rewrote its new commercial terms after one day of pushback, and the word "train" is gone. The Meta Commercial Terms preview still takes effect October 30, 2026. The AI training language we flagged yesterday is no longer in the text. That is a real change. It is not a reason to delete the crawler rules you set up this week.

What actually happened

We read the live preview again on October 17. Here is what changed and what did not.

• Removed: the sentence that let Meta use content from your domains to "train" its products. Nieman Lab reported that explicit wording on October 15. The word does not appear anywhere in the current preview.
• New purpose limit: Meta can now pull content to provide, develop, improve, research and maintain its advertising and business products, and to protect the integrity and security of its products.
• Still there: permission for crawlers and bots on any domain "associated with" your products or services. That phrase is still undefined.
• Still there: the right to access, index, cache, analyze, collect and retrieve that content, and to create test credentials to get in.
• Still missing: any mention of robots.txt.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone had already said the update was about pulling product information for ads, not scraping sites for AI. The new text now matches that statement more closely.

Why Meta's commercial terms still matter for your business

The training clause was the headline. For a store owner, the test-credentials clause is the part to watch. A contract right to create a login on your site and cache what it sees is broad, with or without the word "train." And "develop" and "research" for business products is still a wide purpose.

What we would do before October 30:

• Keep per-bot rules. Meta's crawler docs separate meta-externalagent (AI) from meta-externalads (ads). Blocking the first still costs you nothing if you only run catalog ads.
• Put real auth on gated pages. Wholesale price lists, B2B portals and order history should need an approved account, not a signup form a test login can pass.
• Log Meta's user agents after the 30th. A terms rewrite changes the contract. Your logs show the behavior.
• Save a copy of the terms you accept. This text changed in 24 hours. It can change again.

Sources: Meta Commercial Terms (preview), Nieman Lab, Meta web crawler docs.