Meta drops ‘train’ from its website-crawling terms after backlash

Meta has rewritten new terms that would have let it crawl and train its AI on the websites of businesses that use its ads and tools. Critics say the change does not go far enough.

The company changed the terms late on Friday after complaints from business customers and the media, Gizmodo reported . The revised terms preview no longer uses the word ‘train’.

“We’ve heard you and want to clarify,” Meta said in a statement to the Mercury News.

The company said the crawling terms only ever applied to its ads and business products. It has now spelled that out in the terms.

The original clause let Meta use automated software to access, copy and re-crawl websites linked to its business products, PPC Land reported . It also covered using that content to train Meta’s own products.

The terms take effect on 30 October. Businesses accept them simply by carrying on using Meta’s commercial products.

The News/Media Alliance, which represents US publishers, said the fix only limits what Meta can use content for.

Training was taken out of the listed uses but not expressly banned, spokesperson Sam Quigley told the Mercury News.

Quigley also noted that the terms do not say Meta will respect robots.txt. That is the file sites use to tell crawlers which pages they may visit.

The terms cover data gathered by web scrapers, bots, spiders, crawlers and user agents. That wording lands as AI agents spread across the web and the old rules for bots come under strain.

Meta is pushing hard on AI after launching Muse , its chatbot. Startups such as Firecrawl are also building web tools for agents .