Meta has prepared new Commercial Terms and Self-Serve Ad Terms. They were due to take effect on 30 October 2026. On 26 October a company spokesperson confirmed the date was moving to 20 November to allow more time to explain the changes. A few days later, at least one industry outlet reported that implementation had been paused with no new date, following inquiries from the European Commission and the UK competition authority. As of 5 November we have not been able to confirm a final date from any official Meta source.

The current terms remain in force for now. The content of the new text is already known, though, and two parts of it affect any business advertising on Facebook or Instagram.

If Meta's AI gets it wrong, it is your problem

The text includes a section on AI features. Meta acknowledges that its AI "may make mistakes" and will not always produce accurate, complete or suitable results. It then makes the advertiser "solely responsible" for the risks and for any resulting content, including deciding whether that content is fit for commercial use.

In practice this hits Advantage+ creative enhancements directly: rewritten copy, generated backgrounds, product photos turned into video. If a variant promises something your product does not do, or uses an image you should not be using, the responsibility is not shared.

The terms also prohibit altering or removing watermarks and content-authenticating metadata added by Meta's AI.

Meta will be able to crawl your product pages

The other controversial part authorises Meta to use crawlers and bots to access, index and analyse content on domains associated with the advertiser's products or services. European publishers have asked the Commission to stop these terms. Meta's answer is that site owners can still signal their preferences in robots.txt.

What we would do before they take effect

  • Check which Advantage+ creative enhancements are switched on in each campaign. Some are on by default and nobody remembers accepting them.
  • Review every variant before it goes live, especially in regulated sectors such as health, food, finance or real estate.
  • Keep screenshots of published ads and their variants. If a complaint ever arrives, you will want to know exactly what people saw.
  • Decide which parts of your site you want Meta to crawl and write it down in robots.txt.
  • Read the final terms when Meta publishes them. What we describe here comes from the circulated text and the trade press, and it may still change.

While we are on Meta

Two changes from this year are still causing surprises in reports. Since 12 January 2026 the 7-day and 28-day view-through attribution windows no longer exist, and since March click attribution only counts link clicks; other interactions are reported separately. If you compare 2025 campaigns with current ones, the numbers are not measuring the same thing.

And since 1 July Meta charges a 3% location fee in Spain on top of the campaign budget. Factor it in when you split the spend, or the month will end up costing more than you approved.

Main source on the terms: Marketing-Interactive, 26/10/2026.