Overview
JavaScript is Mauritania's most common secondary barrier
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 95.2% |
| Antibot | 22.1% |
| CAPTCHA | 25.6% |
| JavaScript | 39.7% |
| Rate Limiting | 12.8% |
| TLS | 18.3% |
WAF is present on 95% of Mauritanian sites. CAPTCHA (25.6%) ranks third — ahead of Antibot (22.1%) — making it an unusually prominent secondary barrier for this market.
Barrier Landscape
JavaScript is Mauritania's primary secondary barrier well ahead of CAPTCHA
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 95.2% |
| Antibot | 22.1% |
| CAPTCHA | 25.6% |
| JavaScript | 39.7% |
| Rate Limiting | 12.8% |
| TLS | 18.3% |
| Has robots.txt | 81.3% |
| Blocks AI crawlers | 15.8% |
JavaScript rendering is required on 39.7% of sites, placing it well ahead of every other secondary barrier. CAPTCHA and Antibot trail by more than 14 percentage points.
Single-barrier sites are Mauritania's most common configuration
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 barriers | 2.8% |
| 1 barrier | 32.9% |
| 2 barriers | 31.4% |
| 3 barriers | 19.4% |
| 4 barriers | 8.3% |
| 5 barriers | 4.8% |
| 6 barriers | 0.5% |
2.8% of sites carry zero barriers. The single-barrier stack is the most common configuration (32.9%), while nearly one in eight sites layers three or more barriers simultaneously.
Most Mauritania sites are Simple to access
| Mean recommended tier | |
|---|---|
| All sites | 1.6 |
The median browser difficulty score is 1, meaning more than half of Mauritanian sites are retrievable at Tier 1. A mean of 1.61 reflects a segment of harder-to-reach sites pulling the average up.
Over half of Mauritanian sites are Simple to access
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 1 - Simple | 53.4% |
| 2 - Easy | 34.4% |
| 3 - Moderate | 10% |
| 4 - Complex | 1.7% |
| 5 - Advanced | 0.5% |
53.4% of sites are accessible at Tier 1. A further 34.4% require Tier 2, and only 2.2% reach the highest difficulty tiers (4–5).
robots.txt
AI crawlers are the most-named bot category in Mauritanian robots.txt files
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| AI crawlers | 17.9% |
| SEO / search indexing | 14.6% |
| SEO audit tools | 13.9% |
| Commercial scrapers | 8% |
| Social / content scrapers | 6.8% |
| Archive / research crawlers | 6% |
| Monitoring / uptime bots | 0.5% |
AI crawlers appear in 17.9% of all Mauritanian sites — the most-mentioned category, edging out SEO search indexing bots (14.6%) and SEO audit tools (13.9%).
Uniform per-agent rules are Mauritania's dominant robots.txt posture
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Uniform per-agent rules (no path mixing) | 39.6% |
| Path-level mixed rules for same agent | 35% |
| Allow-only (no disallow rules) | 2.9% |
| Mixed AI posture (block some, allow others) | 3.1% |
| Blanket Disallow: / | 3.3% |
39.6% of sites apply uniform per-agent rules with no path mixing. Blanket Disallow: / accounts for 3.3% — equal in share to Allow-only and Mixed AI posture configurations combined.
GPTBot is Mauritania's most-blocked AI crawler
| Disallowed | Allowed (whitelisted) | |
|---|---|---|
| GPTBot | 13% | 2.4% |
| CCBot | 9.4% | 0.9% |
| ClaudeBot | 9.5% | 1% |
| Google-Extended | 9.7% | 1.3% |
| Bytespider | 7.9% | 0.6% |
| meta-externalagent | 3.7% | 0.5% |
| ChatGPT-User | 6.7% | 3% |
| PerplexityBot | 7.1% | 2.2% |
| Applebot-Extended | 5% | 0.3% |
| OAI-SearchBot | 4.4% | 2.2% |
| anthropic-ai | 5.6% | 1.3% |
GPTBot is explicitly blocked on 13.0% of all Mauritanian sites. Google-Extended (9.7%) and ClaudeBot (9.5%) follow closely, while ChatGPT-User has the highest explicit allow rate at 3.0%.
Multiple Mauritania sectors all name at least one bot to restrict
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Consumer Electronics | 100% |
| Design | 100% |
| Entertainment | 100% |
| Newspapers | 100% |
| Publishing | 100% |
| Retail | 100% |
| Visual Art | 100% |
| Adult | 90% |
| Apparel & Fashion | 90% |
| Beauty & Cosmetics | 90% |
| Computer Hardware | 90% |
| Foreign Language | 90% |
| General | 90% |
| Jewellery & Luxury | 90% |
| Mass Media | 90% |
Consumer Electronics, Design, Entertainment, Newspapers, Publishing, Retail, and Visual Art all show a 100% named-bot block rate — every site in these sectors names at least one crawler to restrict.
Mauritania's Retail sites sites lead in explicitly allowing crawlers
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Retail | 80% |
| Airlines | 70% |
| Hospitality | 70% |
| Photography | 70% |
| Publishing | 70% |
| Science | 70% |
| Social & Charitable | 70% |
| Sporting Goods | 70% |
| Travel & Tourism | 70% |
| Apparel & Fashion | 60% |
| Automotive | 60% |
| Beauty & Cosmetics | 60% |
| Consulting | 60% |
| Ecology & Environment | 60% |
| Graphic Design | 60% |
Retail sites name a bot to explicitly allow in 80% of cases — the highest rate in Mauritania. Airlines, Hospitality, Photography, and six other sectors follow at 70%.
Industry Patterns
Jewellery & Luxury is Mauritania's hardest sector to access programmatically
| WAF | Antibot | CAPTCHA | JavaScript | Rate Limit | TLS | robots.txt | Blocks AI | Tier | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jewellery & Luxury | 100% | 40% | 30% | 30% | 40% | 40% | 90% | 20% | Tier 3 |
| Computer Hardware | 100% | 20% | 0% | 40% | 20% | 20% | 90% | 10% | Tier 3 |
| Retail | 100% | 10% | 0% | 70% | 10% | 10% | 100% | 50% | Tier 2 |
| Hospitality | 100% | 20% | 0% | 70% | 20% | 30% | 70% | 20% | Tier 2 |
| Human Resources | 100% | 80% | 50% | 60% | 40% | 20% | 70% | 10% | Tier 2 |
| Real Estate | 100% | 20% | 20% | 70% | 40% | 20% | 60% | 30% | Tier 2 |
| Transport & Logistics | 70% | 30% | 10% | 30% | 0% | 30% | 70% | 0% | Tier 2 |
| Automotive | 80% | 10% | 10% | 50% | 30% | 60% | 80% | 20% | Tier 2 |
| Sporting Goods | 100% | 20% | 20% | 10% | 30% | 20% | 100% | 0% | Tier 2 |
| Visual Art | 100% | 30% | 30% | 30% | 0% | 10% | 100% | 30% | Tier 2 |
| Consumer Electronics | 70% | 40% | 30% | 40% | 10% | 50% | 100% | 10% | Tier 2 |
| Mail & Delivery | 70% | 30% | 20% | 30% | 0% | 30% | 70% | 0% | Tier 2 |
| Telecom | 90% | 10% | 20% | 60% | 0% | 30% | 100% | 20% | Tier 2 |
| Apparel & Fashion | 90% | 20% | 40% | 60% | 20% | 30% | 90% | 10% | Tier 2 |
| Design | 100% | 20% | 30% | 40% | 20% | 30% | 100% | 30% | Tier 2 |
Jewellery & Luxury posts a mean browser difficulty score of 2.70 — the highest in the country — with 100% WAF adoption, 40% Antibot, and 40% Rate Limiting across its sites.
Non-Profit sites are Mauritania's most accessible sector
| WAF | Antibot | CAPTCHA | JavaScript | Rate Limit | TLS | robots.txt | Blocks AI | Tier | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Museums | 100% | 40% | 30% | 40% | 10% | 20% | 90% | 30% | Tier 2 |
| Travel & Tourism | 100% | 30% | 10% | 80% | 10% | 20% | 70% | 30% | Tier 2 |
| Adult | 100% | 40% | 30% | 70% | 10% | 20% | 90% | 10% | Tier 2 |
| Airlines | 100% | 20% | 10% | 70% | 20% | 30% | 80% | 30% | Tier 2 |
| Food & Beverages | 100% | 40% | 30% | 30% | 0% | 0% | 90% | 30% | Tier 2 |
| Maritime | 90% | 20% | 0% | 40% | 10% | 30% | 90% | 10% | Tier 2 |
| Recruitment & Staffing | 100% | 40% | 50% | 50% | 10% | 10% | 70% | 10% | Tier 2 |
| Sports | 100% | 10% | 20% | 50% | 10% | 10% | 90% | 70% | Tier 2 |
| Wellness | 100% | 40% | 30% | 20% | 40% | 20% | 80% | 10% | Tier 2 |
| Advertising & Mktg | 100% | 30% | 40% | 50% | 0% | 30% | 90% | 10% | Tier 2 |
| Banking | 100% | 0% | 0% | 30% | 10% | 0% | 70% | 10% | Tier 2 |
| Distance Learning | 100% | 40% | 50% | 40% | 30% | 10% | 70% | 30% | Tier 2 |
| Import & Export | 100% | 30% | 30% | 20% | 30% | 20% | 70% | 10% | Tier 2 |
| Music | 100% | 40% | 40% | 60% | 10% | 20% | 100% | 20% | Tier 2 |
| Non-Profit | 90% | 10% | 10% | 50% | 10% | 0% | 70% | 0% | Tier 2 |
Non-Profit records the lowest mean browser difficulty score (1.70) and zero AI-blocking, with 90% WAF adoption but minimal use of secondary barriers such as Antibot (10%) or CAPTCHA (10%).