Meta has suspended the implementation of new commercial and advertising terms scheduled for November 20, 2026. Advertisers and other businesses using its services will therefore continue to operate under the existing terms, which allow Meta to crawl advertiser website content for ‘research and training’ purposes with each ad order.
- Meta suspends the new commercial and advertising terms planned for November 20, 2026.
- The current terms stay in force, and they still allow Meta to crawl advertiser content.
- The suspended terms would have made advertisers solely responsible for AI feature outputs.
- Meta has not changed its crawling methods and promises an update without a set timeline.
In a notice published on its Business Help Center, Meta states that the updates concerning the Commercial Terms, Product Catalog Terms, Self-Service Ad Terms, and AI-Generated Ad Content Terms ‘are now suspended and will not go into effect on November 20, 2026’. On November 5, Nieman Lab reported the publication of this notice. A Meta spokesperson explained: ‘We are pausing the updates while we continue our engagement with stakeholders and take the time to get this right.’
The Current Terms
Meta specifies that the four existing documents remain applicable until further notice. The page for each now opens with a note indicating that updates are pending. During a check conducted on November 10, the updated US and UK English versions of the Commercial Terms and Self-Service Ad Terms displayed a ‘page not available’ message.
The currently effective Commercial Terms, dated March 6, 2024, do not contain a paragraph on content crawling. The suspended version added one, covering sites associated with a business’s products or services. These terms apply to any professional use, including managing a Facebook Page.
The Self-Service Ad Terms, effective since August 22, 2025, already include a crawling permission. By placing an ad order, the advertiser grants Meta the right to ‘access, index, cache, analyze or crawl’ content from its domains. Listed uses include developing advertising products and other business-related products, ‘research and training’, and maintaining the integrity of Meta’s products. Finally, the AI-Generated Ad Content Terms, dated May 6, 2024, allow Meta to crawl URLs provided by advertisers for their ads.
AI Features Also Suspended
According to Adweek, which reported on it in October, the suspended Commercial Terms included a new section titled ‘AI Features’. Advertisers would be ‘solely responsible’ for all results produced by these features, as well as for all modifications they make, including those automatically enabled by Meta.
In the currently effective AI-Generated Ad Content Terms, this responsibility is tied to the advertiser’s own actions. When using or publishing AI-generated content, they are ‘solely responsible’ for verifying whether the result (‘Output’) is correct and whether it can be displayed publicly. A Meta spokesperson, quoted by Adweek, clarified that advertisers can disable any of the Advantage+ features at any time from their Ads Manager account.
Meta’s documentation on its crawlers, which analyze web pages, identifies Meta-ExternalAds for ads and several other business products, and Meta-ExternalAgent for uses such as training foundational AI models. It includes rules for the robots.txt file, which allows website owners to instruct crawlers on what they can scan, and names these two crawlers.
Uncertain Prospects Remain
Businesses using Meta will not be required to comply with new terms before November 20. For advertisers, the crawling permission in the current advertising terms will continue to apply to each new order. Meta states it has made no changes to its crawling methods.
Meta says it continues its engagement with concerned parties and promises an update when it has more information. As of November 10, the announcement did not set a timeline for updating the terms. According to Nieman Lab, courts in Brazil and Norway have issued preliminary injunctions against these terms, following complaints from press organizations. For its part, the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) indicates that its investigation, which covers Meta’s current terms and the proposed changes, remains open, with the first phase of information gathering scheduled until January 2027.
