Ashley Clayton is the Architect of Measurable Marketing Ecosystems™ and Founder of Iterateology — helping coaches, consultants, and done-for-you providers build measurement strategies that reflect how their business actually works, not just what the platforms make easy to count. With 15+ years across tech, marketing, and analytics, she created the Measurable Marketing Ecosystem™ framework to give service providers the upstream thinking they need before touching a single dashboard. She is also a Google Women Techmakers Ambassador and certified business coach.
Meta’s new business terms start November 20
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Hi, Reader! This update is Meta assuming it has permission to send its AI crawlers to the websites connected to businesses that use its products. The first version also said Meta could use what it collected to train its products. After publishers and businesses pushed back, Meta pushed the date back from October 30th and removed that line. The crawling permission is still there, though. And Meta's own documentation still describes its main crawler, meta-externalagent, as collecting content for "training foundation AI models." There's no opt-out checkbox in the terms. Per Meta's notice, the only way to reject them is to stop using its products for your business. They don't want you to know that you have a third option. You can tell Meta's crawler no on your own website. They said you can use your robots.txt file to signal your preferences. That's the file on your site that tells bots what they're allowed to read. The current version of the terms doesn't promise to honor robots.txt, so nobody knows yet how this is going to ultimately play out. It's still the clearest, documented "no" you can put on record, and it takes a few minutes. If you want the full picture of which bots to welcome and which to keep out, my workshop at the AI Newsletter Summit walks through it in more detail than can fit in an email. You can get full access to my talk for free through Friday at 9am ET along with over 20+ others sharing their systems and behind-the-scenes. Click here to register for free for access and my free gift for summit participants. I first wrote about this back in April, including why blocking training bots doesn't hurt your search visibility. I've updated that post with the Meta details and put together an IP Protection Kit that includes a copy of my current robots.txt file, so you can just add my settings to yours. You can read the post if you missed it here. Know someone with a business Instagram or Facebook page? Forward this to them. Most people won’t hear about this until after November 20, and the fix is easier before then. Your words, frameworks, and ideas took years to build. They deserve the same care you give everything else in your business.
P.S. The delay happened because businesses spoke up. If you want to add your name, small businesses have started a public petition asking Meta to drop the forced-consent terms. You can learn more and sign the petition here.
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Iterateology
Ashley Clayton is the Architect of Measurable Marketing Ecosystems™ and Founder of Iterateology — helping coaches, consultants, and done-for-you providers build measurement strategies that reflect how their business actually works, not just what the platforms make easy to count. With 15+ years across tech, marketing, and analytics, she created the Measurable Marketing Ecosystem™ framework to give service providers the upstream thinking they need before touching a single dashboard. She is also a Google Women Techmakers Ambassador and certified business coach.
Hi, Reader!Most of what goes wrong in a GA4 setup isn’t advanced. It’s the basic stuff: UA still half-migrated instead of a clean G- property, a separate property for every offer instead of one for your whole business. Basic things can break, and can break constantly, whether you set it up yourself or paid someone on Fiverr or Upwork to do it for you. I just published a new post walking through the five GA4 setup mistakes I see most often, in the order they tend to show up. It ends with the...
Hi, Reader!I'm speaking at The AI Newsletter Summit later this month, and I wanted to tell you how my talk is relevant regardless of your feelings on AI use as a whole. Most of the 27 workshops will show you how to use AI to write, plan, and sell with your newsletter (or get started if you don't have one). Mine covers what you need to protect from AI scraping and training without shutting you out of search engines or the AI tools people use to find the things you can help them with. Whether...
Hi, Reader!I've audited a lot of GA4 setups, and almost every one of them has the exact same problem underneath it — and it's never the one you'd expect. I just released a new video walking through the 5 mistakes I find most often when auditing GA4 accounts for coaches and service providers — whether you set it up yourself, or paid someone off a site like Fiverr or Upwork to do it for you. You can watch the full video here. Please feel free to share the video if you found it useful as well....