By Tom Whitfield

Starting October 30, Meta will extend its AI scraping privileges from business accounts on Facebook and Instagram to every website linked on its platforms, Nieman Lab reports. There is no opt-out for businesses, short of stopping advertising with Meta altogether.

Media companies and legal professionals read the move as a data grab at the expense of site owners — and a way to avoid paying AI licensing fees.

What do the new terms change?

Meta says the update merely consolidates a maze of policies in one place and changes no rules. Legal experts disagree. They argue, per Nieman Lab, that "the new language creates an opening for Meta to argue its commercial terms supersede other blocking instructions," such as robots.txt files.

Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy, calls it a "remarkable provision to bury in [the] terms of service." He adds that it "would give Meta access to material that would likely cost many millions of dollars in a licensing market."

Danielle Coffey, president and CEO of the News/Media Alliance, called the terms "an appalling, bad-faith policy, and a clear abuse of the company's market power" in a statement posted to social media.

The takeaway: Meta's terms could override technical blocking tools publishers rely on, without payment.

Is search traffic already dying for publishers?

The Independent's social-commerce revenue narrowly surpassed its SEO-based commerce revenue for the first time last month, CEO Christian Broughton said at Digiday's Media Strategies event in London.

The British publisher does not disclose its revenue mix, so the crossover may reflect an AI-driven collapse in search traffic rather than social-commerce growth.

Broughton said the old model — buying and earning abundant search and social traffic, then monetizing it with ads — is "dead." He cited four investment areas expected to account for more than half of The Independent's revenue this year:

• AI
• Creator-led studio work
• Ecommerce
• Memberships

The crossover at one major publisher is a data point, not a trend — but it points one way.

How should sellers handle AI agents?

The Wall Street Journal frames the dilemma for ecommerce sellers: "Do they embrace outside agents in hopes of a sales boost, or do they resist them?" Integration brings traffic; it also brings automated purchases to authenticate, returns, customer service issues and credit-card chargebacks.

Amazon blocks third-party AI agents outright, betting its leverage and data value outweigh any traffic gain. Walmart and Target took the opposite path, cutting licensing deals with OpenAI, Anthropic and others.

Real estate is wrestling with the same tension. Zillow and Compass are clashing over listing practices and transparency, while The Journal separately examined potential antitrust issues in Compass — America's largest brokerage this year — paying sellers to delist properties from other platforms. Companies are also preserving data exclusivity to protect their value to LLMs. Zillow nonetheless signed a deal licensing data to Google for Gemini AI.

Every platform now faces the same trade: hoard the data or license it for cash.

In brief

• Elon Musk has given about $190 million to the Republican party's main Senate Super PAC, which has spent $159 million on advertising for Ken Paxton's Texas Senate bid. [The Texas Tribune]
• Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won an electoral court challenge alleging Meta's algorithms favored opponent Flávio Bolsonaro. [NBC News]
• A WhatsApp clone is appearing as a sponsored result above the real app in Google Play searches. [The Verge]
• Police used AI-generated images of a child to catch a suspected predator on a dating app. [404 Media]
• Gen Z and millennials now drive half of holiday spending. [Chief Marketer]

Moves

• Jenna Bromberg appointed CMO of Arby's.
• Mike Feeley joins PubMatic as VP, North America.
• Crossmedia names Avi Ben-Zvi to oversee paid social operations.

With October 30 approaching and no opt-out on offer, publishers and advertisers must now weigh the value of Meta's reach against the price of their content.