Overview
JavaScript and CAPTCHA both elevate Aerospace & Defense's active barrier profile
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 87% |
| Antibot | 17% |
| CAPTCHA | 26% |
| JavaScript | 36% |
| Rate Limiting | 21% |
| TLS | 15% |
WAF leads at 87%. JavaScript (36%) and CAPTCHA (26%) together form a multi-layer active stack — more than most sectors deploy alongside WAF.
Barrier Landscape
WAF leads Aerospace & Defense at 87% — JavaScript is the main secondary layer
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 87% |
| Antibot | 17% |
| CAPTCHA | 26% |
| JavaScript | 36% |
| Rate Limiting | 21% |
| TLS | 15% |
| Has robots.txt | 67% |
| Blocks AI crawlers | 6% |
WAF dominates at 87%. JavaScript (36%) leads active secondary barriers, followed by CAPTCHA (26%). The remaining three barriers all sit at or below 21% — a concentrated rather than broadly stacked profile.
Aerospace & Defense's barrier counts are spread — no single configuration dominates
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 barriers | 10% |
| 1 barrier | 35% |
| 2 barriers | 27% |
| 3 barriers | 12% |
| 4 barriers | 3% |
| 5 barriers | 13% |
| 6 barriers | 0% |
Barrier counts vary widely across Aerospace & Defense sites. Single-barrier configurations are the modal count at 35%, but the distribution is broad. 28% of sites carry three or more.
Simple is the dominant access tier across Aerospace & Defense
| Mean recommended tier | |
|---|---|
| All sites | 1.49 |
A mean recommended tier of 1.49 and a median of Simple place Aerospace & Defense toward the easier end of the sectors surveyed. 64% of sites are Simple to access; 9% require Moderate or above.
Simple is the dominant tier in Aerospace & Defense, but Easy accounts for a significant share
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 1 - Simple | 64% |
| 2 - Easy | 27% |
| 3 - Moderate | 6% |
| 4 - Complex | 2% |
| 5 - Advanced | 1% |
Simple (64%) is the most common tier. Simple and Easy together account for 91% of sites, while 6% land at Moderate and 3% at Complex or Advanced.
robots.txt
Around two-thirds of Aerospace & Defense sites publish a robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Publish a valid robots.txt | 67% |
67% of Aerospace & Defense sites have a valid robots.txt. The remaining 33% leave crawl policy entirely undefined — a meaningful gap for a sector of this scale.
Most Aerospace & Defense sites name one bot or none in their robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 | 45% |
| 1 | 41% |
| 2–4 | 7% |
| 5–9 | 3% |
| 10–15 | 1% |
| 16+ | 3% |
45% of Aerospace & Defense sites name zero agents and 41% name one. A mean of 2.4 is pulled up by a small number of sites with extensive policies, while the median stays at 1.
AI crawlers draw the most robots.txt attention in Aerospace & Defense
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| AI crawlers | 7% |
| SEO / search indexing | 3% |
| SEO audit tools | 4% |
| Commercial scrapers | 1% |
| Social / content scrapers | 1% |
| Archive / research crawlers | 1% |
| Monitoring / uptime bots | 0% |
AI crawlers are named in 7% of Aerospace & Defense robots.txt files, followed by SEO audit tools at 4%. All figures are percentages of all 100 sites including those with no robots.txt.
Uniform per-agent rules dominate Aerospace & Defense robots.txt files
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Uniform per-agent rules | 37% |
| Path-level mixed rules | 29% |
| Allow-only (no Disallow rules) | 1% |
| Mixed AI posture | 0% |
| Blanket Disallow: / | 0% |
Uniform per-agent rules lead at 37%, with path-level mixed rules at 29%. Mixed AI posture (0%) and blanket Disallow (0%) are minimal.
AI crawlers are among the most-targeted agents in Aerospace & Defense robots.txt
| Disallowed | Allowed (whitelisted) | |
|---|---|---|
| * | 49% | 31% |
| GPTBot | 6% | — |
| Google-Extended | 4% | 1% |
| Bytespider | 4% | — |
| CCBot | 3% | — |
| ClaudeBot | 3% | — |
| AhrefsBot | 3% | — |
| Amazonbot | 2% | — |
| Applebot-Extended | 2% | — |
| meta-externalagent | 2% | — |
| facebookexternalhit/* | 1% | 1% |
| magpie-crawler | 2% | — |
| Bingbot | 1% | 1% |
| Yandex | 1% | — |
| MJ12Bot | 1% | — |
| Megaindex | 1% | — |
| serpstatbot | 1% | — |
| 008 | 1% | — |
| AddThis.com | 1% | — |
| BDCbot | 1% | — |
| BIXOCRAWLER | 1% | — |
| BLEXBot | 1% | — |
| BUbiNG | 1% | — |
| Bender | 1% | — |
| CNCDialer | 1% | — |
Values are percentages of all 100 Aerospace & Defense sites surveyed. The wildcard (*) leads at 49% Disallow. Among named agents, GPTBot, Google-Extended lead the Disallow list — reflecting direct targeting of AI training and indexing bots.
Industry Cohort
Aerospace & Defense is the most accessible sub-category in the Manufacturing & Logistics cohort
| WAF | Antibot | CAPTCHA | JavaScript | Rate Limit | TLS | robots.txt | Blocks AI | Tier | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aerospace & Defense | 87% | 17% | 26% | 36% | 21% | 15% | 67% | 6% | Tier 1 |
| Chemicals | 83% | 8% | 19% | 31% | 7% | 8% | 71% | 8% | Tier 1 |
| Civil Engineering | 89% | 13% | 22% | 38% | 19% | 14% | 60% | 5% | Tier 1 |
| Import & Export | 93% | 19% | 17% | 35% | 17% | 13% | 69% | 6% | Tier 1 |
| Machinery | 91% | 13% | 17% | 49% | 20% | 15% | 80% | 10% | Tier 2 |
| Mail & Package Delivery | 91% | 15% | 19% | 37% | 17% | 15% | 70% | 3% | Tier 1 |
| Manufacturing | 92% | 20% | 19% | 45% | 24% | 18% | 75% | 9% | Tier 2 |
| Maritime | 87% | 22% | 24% | 41% | 19% | 12% | 62% | 8% | Tier 1 |
| Metals & Mining | 87% | 26% | 30% | 39% | 25% | 16% | 72% | 4% | Tier 1 |
| Plastics & Polymers | 98% | 10% | 29% | 34% | 13% | 10% | 80% | 4% | Tier 1 |
| Transportation & Logistics | 78% | 15% | 16% | 35% | 17% | 18% | 67% | 2% | Tier 1 |
| Warehousing | 98% | 18% | 27% | 38% | 22% | 8% | 75% | 4% | Tier 1 |
A median tier of Simple and mean of 1.38 make Aerospace & Defense the easiest to access programmatically within Manufacturing & Logistics. WAF (87%) and AI blocking (6%) are below cohort peers.