Overview
JavaScript and CAPTCHA both elevate Design's active barrier profile
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 99% |
| Antibot | 24% |
| CAPTCHA | 27% |
| JavaScript | 40% |
| Rate Limiting | 21% |
| TLS | 11% |
WAF leads at 99%. JavaScript (40%) and CAPTCHA (27%) together form a multi-layer active stack — more than most sectors deploy alongside WAF.
Barrier Landscape
WAF leads Design at 99% — JavaScript is the main secondary layer
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 99% |
| Antibot | 24% |
| CAPTCHA | 27% |
| JavaScript | 40% |
| Rate Limiting | 21% |
| TLS | 11% |
| Has robots.txt | 89% |
| Blocks AI crawlers | 14% |
WAF dominates at 99%. JavaScript (40%) leads active secondary barriers, followed by CAPTCHA (27%). The remaining three barriers all sit at or below 24% — a concentrated rather than broadly stacked profile.
Design's barrier counts are spread — no single configuration dominates
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 barriers | 0% |
| 1 barrier | 37% |
| 2 barriers | 35% |
| 3 barriers | 13% |
| 4 barriers | 2% |
| 5 barriers | 10% |
| 6 barriers | 3% |
Barrier counts vary widely across Design sites. Single-barrier configurations are the modal count at 37%, but the distribution is broad. 28% of sites carry three or more.
Design sites are predominantly Simple to access
| Mean recommended tier | |
|---|---|
| All sites | 1.41 |
A mean recommended tier of 1.41 and a median of Simple place Design toward the easier end of the sectors surveyed. 69% of sites are Simple to access; 8% require Moderate or above.
Simple tier covers more than two-thirds of Design sites
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 1 - Simple | 69% |
| 2 - Easy | 23% |
| 3 - Moderate | 7% |
| 4 - Complex | 0% |
| 5 - Advanced | 1% |
Simple (69%) is the most common tier. Simple and Easy together account for 92% of sites, while 7% land at Moderate and 1% at Complex or Advanced.
robots.txt
Most Design sites publish a robots.txt — coverage above the norm
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Publish a valid robots.txt | 89% |
89% of Design sites publish a valid robots.txt. The 11% without a file leave crawl policy undefined — a lower gap than the cross-sector average of around 24%.
Design sites name a handful of agents in robots.txt — few commit to comprehensive policies
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 | 20% |
| 1 | 49% |
| 2–4 | 14% |
| 5–9 | 6% |
| 10–15 | 3% |
| 16+ | 8% |
The mean of 4.8 named agents reflects limited bot-policy investment in Design. 20% of sites name no agents; 49% name exactly one. Only 8% maintain a list of 16 or more named bots.
AI crawlers draw the most robots.txt attention in Design
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| AI crawlers | 14% |
| SEO / search indexing | 6% |
| SEO audit tools | 8% |
| Commercial scrapers | 5% |
| Social / content scrapers | 0% |
| Archive / research crawlers | 3% |
| Monitoring / uptime bots | 0% |
AI crawlers are named in 14% of Design robots.txt files, followed by SEO audit tools at 8%. All figures are percentages of all 100 sites including those with no robots.txt.
Uniform per-agent rules dominate Design robots.txt files
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Uniform per-agent rules | 54% |
| Path-level mixed rules | 31% |
| Allow-only (no Disallow rules) | 3% |
| Mixed AI posture | 5% |
| Blanket Disallow: / | 1% |
Uniform per-agent rules lead at 54%, with path-level mixed rules at 31%. Mixed AI posture (5%) and blanket Disallow (1%) are minimal.
AI crawlers are among the most-targeted agents in Design robots.txt
| Disallowed | Allowed (whitelisted) | |
|---|---|---|
| * | 75% | 33% |
| CCBot | 12% | 2% |
| GPTBot | 10% | 3% |
| Google-Extended | 9% | 2% |
| FacebookBot | 7% | 2% |
| Bytespider | 7% | 2% |
| ClaudeBot | 7% | 2% |
| anthropic-ai | 6% | 2% |
| omgili | 5% | 2% |
| Applebot-Extended | 5% | 2% |
| Claude-Web | 5% | 2% |
| Diffbot | 5% | 2% |
| ImagesiftBot | 5% | 2% |
| Timpibot | 5% | 2% |
| Webzio-Extended | 5% | 2% |
| PerplexityBot | 4% | 2% |
| Ai2Bot-Dolma | 4% | 2% |
| FriendlyCrawler | 4% | 2% |
| ICC-Crawler | 4% | 2% |
| Scrapy | 4% | 2% |
| VelenPublicWebCrawler | 4% | 2% |
| img2dataset | 4% | 2% |
| Yandex | 4% | 2% |
| OAI-SearchBot | 2% | 3% |
| meta-externalagent | 3% | 2% |
Values are percentages of all 100 Design sites surveyed. The wildcard (*) leads at 75% Disallow. Among named agents, CCBot, GPTBot lead the Disallow list — reflecting direct targeting of AI training and indexing bots.
Industry Cohort
Design sits mid-table within the Design & Creative Arts cohort
| WAF | Antibot | CAPTCHA | JavaScript | Rate Limit | TLS | robots.txt | Blocks AI | Tier | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Architecture | 95% | 21% | 33% | 40% | 20% | 10% | 84% | 12% | Tier 1 |
| Ceramics & Pottery | 97% | 16% | 38% | 47% | 17% | 12% | 77% | 5% | Tier 1 |
| Comics & Animation | 93% | 15% | 28% | 34% | 10% | 7% | 77% | 6% | Tier 1 |
| Crafts | 98% | 21% | 34% | 44% | 24% | 12% | 82% | 18% | Tier 1 |
| Design | 99% | 24% | 27% | 40% | 21% | 11% | 89% | 14% | Tier 1 |
| Graphic Design | 99% | 11% | 21% | 19% | 12% | 9% | 87% | 9% | Tier 1 |
| Performing Arts | 93% | 11% | 19% | 39% | 19% | 11% | 75% | 7% | Tier 1 |
| Photography | 95% | 19% | 28% | 42% | 42% | 32% | 68% | 15% | Tier 1 |
| Printing | 98% | 19% | 28% | 34% | 13% | 10% | 81% | 6% | Tier 1 |
| Visual Art | 98% | 20% | 31% | 43% | 20% | 10% | 84% | 22% | Tier 1 |
Across Design & Creative Arts, Design's barrier rates are broadly in line with peers. WAF at 99%, JavaScript at 40%, and AI blocking at 14% all sit near the cohort median. Tier difficulty (mean 1.34) is below the group average.