Meta's Terms Update on October 30, 2026: What Changes for Your Business

TL;DR

• On October 30, 2026 Meta's terms change: four documents become two.
• There is nothing to accept: if you keep using Meta's products after the notice, the new terms apply.
• Meta may crawl your site for its advertising and business products; you state preferences in robots.txt.
• What Meta's AI generates in your ads is your risk, and you must not remove watermarks or metadata.
• Nothing changes for WhatsApp Business (pricing, templates, the 24-hour window) or in your Zavu account.

What Meta announced

Meta is updating its terms, effective October 30, 2026. Four documents are involved, and almost every business that sells or advertises on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger or WhatsApp has agreed to at least one of them:

• Commercial Terms, which govern business use of Meta's products.
• Product Catalog Terms, which become part of the Commercial Terms.
• Self-Serve Ad Terms, the ones you accept when you create ads in Ads Manager.
• Ad Creative Generative AI Terms, which are folded into the Self-Serve Ad Terms.

Meta says the goal is to reduce overlap between its agreements. In practice you go from four documents to two, with a few substantive changes worth reading. This summary is based on the preview versions Meta has published. It is not legal advice: if your business depends on Meta advertising, have counsel read the full text.

How you accept them

There is no "accept" button. The updated Commercial Terms say that if you keep using Meta's products after being notified of an update, you agree to be bound by it. If you disagree, the alternative is to stop using them for business purposes. Changes to the dispute resolution section apply only to disputes that arise after the notice.

Put simply: if on October 30 your store is still running ads, your catalog is still syncing, or your Page is still answering on Messenger, the new terms apply to you.

The most discussed change: Meta may crawl your site

Both updated documents, the commercial terms and the ad terms, include an explicit authorization. Meta, or anyone acting on its behalf, may use automated software such as bots and crawlers to index, cache, analyze, collect and extract the domains, pages and URLs associated with your products or services, and to refresh them periodically.

The stated purpose is to provide, develop, improve, research and maintain Meta's advertising and business products, and to maintain the integrity and security of its products.

Two details matter:

• The wording changed during the preview. According to archived captures of the page cited by Unite.AI, an earlier version included a sentence about using that content to "train". The version published on October 17 no longer has it.
• Meta says its practice is not changing. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said, as reported by Unite.AI, that there is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers, that the update is about reading accurate product information for ads and recommendations, and that content owners can use robots.txt to state their preferences.

If you sell online, there is a useful side to this: Meta reads those pages to show the right price, availability and description in your ads. If there are sections you do not want read, such as a customer area or wholesale pricing, the place to say so is your robots.txt, checked against Meta's crawler documentation.

Generative AI in ads: the risk is yours

If you use Meta's tools that generate ad copy, images or variations with AI, the terms are clear about who answers for the output:

• You acknowledge that AI features can make mistakes.
• You bear all the risks of those features, including deciding whether generated content is fit for your ad.
• You must not alter or remove watermarks or content authentication metadata the AI adds.

The current generative AI terms, now moving inside the ad terms, already asked for things worth keeping in mind: hold the rights to what you upload as input, keep personal information out of those inputs, review outputs before you use them, and do not present AI-generated content as made by people.

For a US retailer running ads with product shots edited by Meta's AI tools, the practical consequence is simple: if the ad says something untrue about the product, the advertiser is responsible, not the tool.

Product catalogs

The Product Catalog Terms stop being a separate document. The updated Commercial Terms list creating or using a product catalog among the business uses they cover, and bring in the Merchant Agreement when you use features that let you show and sell products. If you sync a Shopify or WooCommerce catalog to Facebook and Instagram, read that agreement: it holds the concrete obligations about what you list.

What does not change

None of the four documents governs messaging on the WhatsApp Business Platform. There is nothing about per-message pricing, template approval or the 24-hour window. In the ad terms, WhatsApp appears only as one of the places ads can be shown.

This month's WhatsApp pricing changes are a different thing with different dates. We cover them in WhatsApp's 1,000 free service messages and in WhatsApp Business API news.

What it means if you use Zavu

Zavu is not a party to this agreement: you accept Meta's terms yourself, as an advertiser or as a business using Meta's products. Nothing changes in your Zavu account or your integration.

Where the two meet is ads that open a WhatsApp conversation. If you pay for Meta ads that lead to your number, those ads fall under the updated Self-Serve Ad Terms. What happens next, when the person writes to you, reaches Zavu as it always has: the message.inbound webhook for the first message of that conversation carries a referral object with the source ad and the ctwaClid, the identifier Meta's Conversions API needs to credit a sale to the ad. It only arrives on that first message, so store it when it does. The real estate leads from WhatsApp tutorial shows how to receive that webhook and push it to your CRM.

Checklist before October 30

To check how ad attribution reaches your system, or to connect WhatsApp, Instagram or Messenger to Zavu, start from Channels in the dashboard. What is new on the platform is in Zavu 2.0.

Sources

• Meta: Commercial Terms, version effective October 30, 2026
• Meta: Self-Serve Ad Terms, version effective October 30, 2026
• Meta: Current Commercial Terms
• Meta: Ad Creative Generative AI Terms
• Meta: Merchant Agreement
• Meta for Developers: Meta web crawlers and robots.txt
• Unite.AI: Meta Rewrites Web-Crawling Clause in Pending Commercial Terms, on the wording change and Meta's statement