Meta can crawl your store

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🕸️ Meta's new terms start October 30. List every domain tied to your business account

On October 19, Net Influencer reported that Meta's updated commercial terms take effect on October 30 for organizations with a Meta business account, which covers anyone running ads, managing a Page or using Ads Manager.

Under the terms, Meta can access, crawl and periodically pull updates from domains "associated with" business accounts, and may create test credentials to access them. The content can be used to provide, develop, improve and train Meta's products, including AI at Meta. There's no opt-out short of stopping commercial use of Meta's products.

Meta told the outlet the update consolidates existing language, won't change how it crawls and that site owners can still manage access through robots.txt.

For a store, the practical question is which of your sites are exposed, and what you want crawled.

Inventory your associated domains

List every domain and subdomain connected to your Meta business account: your main store, regional stores, a blog, landing page domains and anything verified in Business Manager.

Then add the sites people forget: wholesale portals, member pricing areas and staging sites.

Decide what each one should allow

Main store: product pages are already public and feed your ads. Blocking Meta's crawlers here may affect how your products appear in ads, so think carefully.

Gated areas: wholesale portals and member-only pricing deserve a closer look, given the reference to test credentials. Make sure access requires manual approval.

Staging sites: these shouldn't be publicly reachable at all.

Write robots.txt rules carefully

In a video published October 21, Google's Gary Illyes noted that robots.txt controls access and has no say over what happens to data afterward. To block a specific crawler, you target its user-agent token, and other crawlers may not support every feature Google does.

So check the user-agent tokens each Meta crawler uses before writing rules, and test them.

Watch your sign-ups

If test accounts appear, they'll likely show up as new registrations. Keep an eye on account creation in gated areas after October 30, and require manual approval for wholesale access.

Ask your legal team

Terms like these raise questions only counsel can answer for your business. Share the inventory from Step 1 with them before October 30.

List every domain tied to your Meta business account. Many stores find at least one they'd forgotten.

Together with Omnisend

What Happened to Everyone Who Bought Last Black Friday? 

Before you spend more bringing new shoppers in, what happened to the people who bought last Black Friday? Some haven’t returned. Your next campaign could give them a reason to.

Omnisend’s BFCM AI playbook shows you how to turn customer and campaign data into work you can use this season:

• Find past BFCM buyers who haven’t purchased again and build a dedicated audience.
• Identify the offers behind your strongest campaigns to inform this year’s calendar.
• Check welcome and abandoned-cart emails for weak spots before holiday traffic arrives.

With Omnisend connected to Claude or ChatGPT, you can create segments and editable email templates from the conversation. Review them in Omnisend before sending.

The email and SMS platform serves 150,000+ brands, and you can start free without a credit card.

Use the prompts now, while there’s time to address what you find before your busiest selling weekend.

📢 ChatGPT tests new shopping ads, CTA buttons and AI-powered creative enhancements

OpenAI is expanding ChatGPT's advertising capabilities with single-brand shopping ads, clickable CTA buttons and automated creative enhancements, while fixing a tracking bug that caused marketers to underestimate referral traffic.

The Breakdown:

ChatGPT Tests Single-Brand Shopping Ads - New ad units appear at the bottom of ChatGPT responses, displaying products from one advertiser with its website name, favicon, product images, and prices.

CTA Buttons Appear Inside ChatGPT Ads - OpenAI is testing clickable calls to action with dotted underlines and arrow icons, giving advertisers a more prominent way to direct users toward their websites or offers.

AI Will Automatically Modify Ad Creatives - Starting October 29, OpenAI's creative enhancements will be enabled by default, allowing AI to rewrite headlines, translate copy, resize images, and change landing page destinations without approving every variation.

ChatGPT Fixes Referral Tracking Bug - Missing UTM parameters caused approximately 31,000 daily ChatGPT visits to disappear from referral reports in one analysis, with many classified as direct traffic. OpenAI began rolling out a fix on October 15.

ChatGPT is expanding its advertising formats while introducing more automation into campaign delivery. Advertisers gain new opportunities for product visibility and engagement, but should review creative enhancement settings and monitor attribution accuracy to maintain control over their campaigns and measure performance reliably.

👨‍💻 Quick Hits

📈 Meta reported $64.6 billion in Q3 revenue, up 26%, with daily users reaching 3.64 billion. Ad prices rose 14%, while expenses surged 68% amid growing AI investments.

📊 A study of 145 million sessions found ChatGPT referrals equaled just 0.62% of Google organic traffic. ChatGPT visitors converted more frequently, but Google generated 27 times more conversions.

🔗 Google confirmed raw and percent-encoded brackets are treated as separate URLs, potentially causing duplicate crawling. Google recommends using encoded brackets consistently across internal links, canonical tags and sitemaps.

📦 TikTok Shop integrated UPS-owned Happy Returns, allowing eligible U.S. shoppers to return purchases without boxes or labels at nearly 10,000 locations, with instant refunds and AI-powered fraud detection.

🥳 Events 

🔥 Where to Put Your Next Growth Dollar Beyond Meta

October 29 | The Glasshouse, NYC | Free In-Person Event

Hear how Reddit CEO Steve Huffman thinks about discovery, how Cody Plofker helped scale Jones Road Beauty to nine figures, and how brands like Liquid I.V. and MANSCAPED use TV to drive measurable revenue. Bring your hardest acquisition question and leave with a sharper channel plan.

✅ Reserve Your Spot

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