Overview
JavaScript leads Chemicals's secondary barrier stack above the norm
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 83% |
| Antibot | 8% |
| CAPTCHA | 19% |
| JavaScript | 31% |
| Rate Limiting | 7% |
| TLS | 8% |
WAF at 83% is the dominant barrier. JavaScript (31%) leads secondary coverage. The remaining barriers sit materially lower, giving Chemicals a narrow but defined secondary layer.
Barrier Landscape
WAF leads Chemicals at 83% — JavaScript is the main secondary layer
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 83% |
| Antibot | 8% |
| CAPTCHA | 19% |
| JavaScript | 31% |
| Rate Limiting | 7% |
| TLS | 8% |
| Has robots.txt | 71% |
| Blocks AI crawlers | 8% |
WAF dominates at 83%. JavaScript (31%) leads active secondary barriers, followed by CAPTCHA (19%). The remaining three barriers all sit at or below 8% — a concentrated rather than broadly stacked profile.
Chemicals's barrier counts are spread — no single configuration dominates
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 barriers | 14% |
| 1 barrier | 38% |
| 2 barriers | 31% |
| 3 barriers | 14% |
| 4 barriers | 1% |
| 5 barriers | 2% |
| 6 barriers | 0% |
Barrier counts vary widely across Chemicals sites. Single-barrier configurations are the modal count at 38%, but the distribution is broad. 17% of sites carry three or more.
Most Chemicals sites are Simple to access
| Mean recommended tier | |
|---|---|
| All sites | 1.42 |
A mean recommended tier of 1.42 and a median of Simple place Chemicals toward the easier end of the sectors surveyed. 66% of sites are Simple to access; 8% require Moderate or above.
Simple tier covers more than two-thirds of Chemicals sites
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 1 - Simple | 66% |
| 2 - Easy | 26% |
| 3 - Moderate | 8% |
| 4 - Complex | 0% |
| 5 - Advanced | 0% |
Simple (66%) is the most common tier. Simple and Easy together account for 92% of sites, while 8% land at Moderate and 0% at Complex or Advanced.
robots.txt
Around seven in ten Chemicals sites publish a robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Publish a valid robots.txt | 71% |
71% of Chemicals sites have a valid robots.txt. The remaining 29% leave crawl policy entirely undefined — a meaningful gap for a sector of this scale.
Most Chemicals sites name one bot or none in their robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 | 40% |
| 1 | 40% |
| 2–4 | 8% |
| 5–9 | 3% |
| 10–15 | 2% |
| 16+ | 7% |
40% of Chemicals sites name zero agents and 40% name one. A mean of 9.2 is pulled up by a small number of sites with extensive policies, while the median stays at 1.
AI crawlers and SEO audit tools draw near-equal attention in Chemicals robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| AI crawlers | 11% |
| SEO / search indexing | 8% |
| SEO audit tools | 10% |
| Commercial scrapers | 3% |
| Social / content scrapers | 0% |
| Archive / research crawlers | 3% |
| Monitoring / uptime bots | 0% |
AI crawlers appears in 11% of Chemicals sites; SEO audit tools in 10%. The near-equal split reflects a sector that treats both categories with comparable priority. Figures are percentages of all 100 sites.
Uniform per-agent rules dominate Chemicals robots.txt files
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Uniform per-agent rules | 41% |
| Path-level mixed rules | 28% |
| Allow-only (no Disallow rules) | 2% |
| Mixed AI posture | 1% |
| Blanket Disallow: / | 0% |
Uniform per-agent rules lead at 41%, with path-level mixed rules at 28%. Mixed AI posture (1%) and blanket Disallow (0%) are minimal.
AI crawlers are among the most-targeted agents in Chemicals robots.txt
| Disallowed | Allowed (whitelisted) | |
|---|---|---|
| * | 55% | 29% |
| GPTBot | 8% | 3% |
| Googlebot | 4% | 4% |
| Baiduspider | 4% | 2% |
| ChatGPT-User | 5% | 1% |
| MJ12bot | 5% | 1% |
| Sosospider | 3% | 2% |
| YandexBot | 3% | 2% |
| YoudaoBot | 3% | 2% |
| Adsbot-Google | 2% | 2% |
| Sogou spider | 2% | 2% |
| Sogou+spider | 2% | 2% |
| SemrushBot | 3% | 1% |
| BLEXBot | 4% | — |
| Amazonbot | 4% | — |
| Nutch | 4% | — |
| DotBot | 3% | — |
| JikeSpider | 3% | — |
| YisouSpider | 3% | — |
| ZoominfoBot | 3% | — |
| CazoodleBot | 3% | — |
| Gigabot | 3% | — |
| AhrefsBot | 3% | — |
| TurnitinBot | 3% | — |
| OAI-SearchBot | 3% | — |
Values are percentages of all 100 Chemicals sites surveyed. The wildcard (*) leads at 55% Disallow. Among named agents, GPTBot, ChatGPT-User lead the Disallow list — reflecting direct targeting of AI training and indexing bots.
Industry Cohort
Chemicals sits mid-table within 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 |
Across Manufacturing & Logistics, Chemicals's barrier rates are broadly in line with peers. WAF at 83%, JavaScript at 31%, and AI blocking at 8% all sit near the cohort median. Tier difficulty (mean 1.37) is below the group average.