Overview
JavaScript and Rate Limiting both elevate Automotive's active barrier profile
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 92% |
| Antibot | 16% |
| CAPTCHA | 9% |
| JavaScript | 44% |
| Rate Limiting | 38% |
| TLS | 16% |
WAF leads at 92%. JavaScript (44%) and Rate Limiting (38%) together form a multi-layer active stack — more than most sectors deploy alongside WAF.
Barrier Landscape
WAF leads Automotive at 92% — JavaScript is the main secondary layer
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 92% |
| Antibot | 16% |
| CAPTCHA | 9% |
| JavaScript | 44% |
| Rate Limiting | 38% |
| TLS | 16% |
| Has robots.txt | 80% |
| Blocks AI crawlers | 22% |
WAF dominates at 92%. JavaScript (44%) leads active secondary barriers, followed by Rate Limiting (38%). The remaining three barriers all sit at or below 16% — a concentrated rather than broadly stacked profile.
Automotive's barrier counts are spread — no single configuration dominates
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 barriers | 3% |
| 1 barrier | 37% |
| 2 barriers | 24% |
| 3 barriers | 20% |
| 4 barriers | 11% |
| 5 barriers | 4% |
| 6 barriers | 1% |
Barrier counts vary widely across Automotive sites. Single-barrier configurations are the modal count at 37%, but the distribution is broad. 36% of sites carry three or more.
Automotive is moderately challenging to access — harder than most sectors
| Mean recommended tier | |
|---|---|
| All sites | 2.28 |
A mean recommended tier of 2.28 and a median of Easy place Automotive toward the harder end of the sectors surveyed. 24% of sites are Simple to access; 35% require Moderate or above.
Easy is the most common access tier across Automotive sites
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 1 - Simple | 24.2% |
| 2 - Easy | 40.4% |
| 3 - Moderate | 21.2% |
| 4 - Complex | 11.1% |
| 5 - Advanced | 3% |
Easy (40%) is the most common tier. Simple and Easy together account for 65% of sites, while 21% land at Moderate and 14% at Complex or Advanced.
robots.txt
Four in five Automotive sites publish a robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Publish a valid robots.txt | 80% |
80% of Automotive sites have a valid robots.txt. The remaining 20% leave crawl policy entirely undefined — a meaningful gap for a sector of this scale.
Automotive's robots.txt files show moderate engagement with named bot policy
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 | 23% |
| 1 | 24% |
| 2–4 | 18% |
| 5–9 | 15% |
| 10–15 | 6% |
| 16+ | 14% |
A mean of 12.6 named agents reflects moderate bot-policy investment in Automotive. 23% of sites name no agents; 14% name 16 or more. The median of 2 suggests a bimodal split.
SEO crawlers draw the most robots.txt attention in Automotive
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| AI crawlers | 24% |
| SEO / search indexing | 25% |
| SEO audit tools | 17% |
| Commercial scrapers | 12% |
| Social / content scrapers | 2% |
| Archive / research crawlers | 9% |
| Monitoring / uptime bots | 0% |
SEO / search indexing bots are mentioned by 25% of Automotive sites. AI crawlers follow at 24%. All figures are percentages of all 100 Automotive sites surveyed.
Path-level mixed rules dominate Automotive robots.txt posture
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Uniform per-agent rules | 37% |
| Path-level mixed rules | 39% |
| Allow-only (no Disallow rules) | 3% |
| Mixed AI posture | 6% |
| Blanket Disallow: / | 1% |
Path-level mixed rules lead at 39%, with uniform per-agent rules at 37%. Mixed AI posture reaches 6%.
AI crawlers are among the most-targeted agents in Automotive robots.txt
| Disallowed | Allowed (whitelisted) | |
|---|---|---|
| * | 71% | 40% |
| Mediapartners-Google | 6% | 14% |
| GPTBot | 14% | 4% |
| Googlebot | 9% | 8% |
| Yandex | 13% | 4% |
| AdsBot-Google | 7% | 7% |
| ClaudeBot | 11% | 3% |
| CCBot | 14% | — |
| Google-Extended | 9% | 3% |
| Bytespider | 10% | 1% |
| ChatGPT-User | 7% | 4% |
| OAI-SearchBot | 7% | 3% |
| bingbot | 5% | 4% |
| Baiduspider | 8% | 1% |
| MJ12bot | 9% | — |
| AhrefsBot | 9% | — |
| PerplexityBot | 7% | 1% |
| ia_archiver | 6% | 2% |
| BLEXBot | 8% | — |
| Amazonbot | 7% | 1% |
| Googlebot-Image | 2% | 5% |
| Claude-Web | 5% | 2% |
| Exabot | 7% | — |
| Googlebot-News | 6% | 1% |
| PetalBot | 7% | — |
Values are percentages of all 100 Automotive sites surveyed. The wildcard (*) leads at 71% Disallow. Among named agents, GPTBot, CCBot lead the Disallow list — reflecting direct targeting of AI training and indexing bots.