Meta’s updated commercial terms take effect on 30 October, and a clause about crawling the websites linked to business accounts has publishers talking about deleting their Facebook and Instagram pages. For most of our clients, walking away from Meta is not realistic, but ignoring the change is not sensible either.
What’s happened
Meta has told business account holders that new commercial terms apply from 30 October 2026, and, as Press Gazette reported on 19 October, those terms authorise Meta’s crawlers to access, index, cache and collect content from the domains and web pages linked to a business’s products, and to use that content to provide, develop, improve and research its own products. After legal experts pointed out that the original wording also included the word “train”, Meta removed it and said the terms only ever applied to its ads and business products, that robots.txt preferences are respected and that “this is not about scraping news sites”. The Movement for an Open Web is not reassured: it is advising publishers to delete their Meta business accounts before the deadline and is preparing complaints to the Competition and Markets Authority, while the News Media Association has called the move a “shameless landgrab attempt”. Reports still differ on what the terms say today: The Verge reported the provision had been removed, but PPC Land said the UK English preview it checked on 18 October still contained the training wording.
Why it matters to auction houses, promoters and specialist advertisers
This is being written up as a publishers’ story, but the clause covers any website linked to a business account, which means an auction house’s online catalogue, a promoter’s fight-night pages and a claims firm’s guidance pages are all in scope. Auction houses in particular spend real money on catalogue photography, condition reports and provenance essays, and those are exactly the assets a crawler would collect.
We are not lawyers, and Meta says nothing changes in practice. The practical problem is that the only opt-out on offer is to stop using Meta for business altogether. Facebook Pages, Instagram business profiles, Ads Manager, Business Manager and WhatsApp Business are all covered. Deleting them means losing the pixel history, custom audiences and lookalikes built up over years, which for most of our clients would cost more than any crawler could. Meta is still the cheapest way to put a sale, a fight or a claims campaign in front of the right people at a week’s notice.
So the question is not “leave or stay” but “how do we stay on our own terms”. When a platform changes its rules, we read the rules, we work out what they mean for each client’s plan, and we rebalance the spend so that nobody is hostage to a single platform. That is also why we keep our late-space press, radio and out-of-home relationships warm all year: if a client pauses Meta for a month while the lawyers look at it, we can switch that budget into discounted late space within days.
What we’d do
First, read the UK version of the terms before 30 October rather than relying on the headlines, including ours. The wording appears to have changed more than once in a week, and what you are agreeing to is what is on Meta’s terms page on the day. If your website content is a core commercial asset, as a catalogue is for an auction house, ask your solicitor to read it too.
Second, take Meta at its word on robots.txt and tidy it up. Decide which crawlers you are happy to have on your catalogue and archive pages and block the rest, and consider adding a no-scraping clause to your own website terms, as the Movement for an Open Web suggests. It is cheap, and it puts your position on record whatever the terms end up saying.
Third, make sure Meta is not the only place your audience lives. Your bidder lists, fan databases and enquiry records should sit in your own CRM, not only inside a custom audience. We build plans for clients where Meta does a specific job, usually reach and retargeting in the final week before a sale or an event, and where press, radio and out-of-home carry the rest. That way, a terms change becomes a plan adjustment rather than a crisis.
How VCM can help
We run Meta campaigns for auction houses, promoters and specialist firms as one part of a wider plan, so a platform change never leaves a client without a route to their audience. You can read about our approach on our social media advertising page. If you want a second opinion on what these terms mean for your plan, get in touch, call 0333 577 1848 or email James@vcmweb.co.uk and we’ll talk it through with you, no obligation.
