Meta's AI crawl clause takes effect October 30

From October 30, 2026, Meta's updated Commercial Terms let it crawl websites associated with business accounts (ads, Pages, catalogs, WhatsApp Business) and use the data to train its products. There is no partial opt-out short of ending business use of Meta's services. Because robots.txt changes can take up to 24 hours to apply, the last safe edit is October 29.

• Terms take effect October 30, 2026, with no partial opt-out
• robots.txt changes can take up to 24 hours to propagate
• 8–11% of top-1,000 sites return 403 to AI crawlers their robots.txt allows
• 44.5% of sites blocking GPTBot also blocked the search bot by mistake