Overview
JavaScript leads Ecology & Environment's secondary barrier stack above the norm
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 90% |
| Antibot | 13% |
| CAPTCHA | 13% |
| JavaScript | 42% |
| Rate Limiting | 16% |
| TLS | 13% |
WAF at 90% is the dominant barrier. JavaScript (42%) leads secondary coverage. The remaining barriers sit materially lower, giving Ecology & Environment a narrow but defined secondary layer.
Barrier Landscape
WAF leads Ecology & Environment at 90% — JavaScript is the main secondary layer
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 90% |
| Antibot | 13% |
| CAPTCHA | 13% |
| JavaScript | 42% |
| Rate Limiting | 16% |
| TLS | 13% |
| Has robots.txt | 76% |
| Blocks AI crawlers | 10% |
WAF dominates at 90%. JavaScript (42%) leads active secondary barriers, followed by Rate Limiting (16%). The remaining three barriers all sit at or below 13% — a concentrated rather than broadly stacked profile.
Ecology & Environment's barrier counts are spread — no single configuration dominates
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 barriers | 8% |
| 1 barrier | 37% |
| 2 barriers | 31% |
| 3 barriers | 14% |
| 4 barriers | 4% |
| 5 barriers | 6% |
| 6 barriers | 0% |
Barrier counts vary widely across Ecology & Environment sites. Single-barrier configurations are the modal count at 37%, but the distribution is broad. 24% of sites carry three or more.
Ecology & Environment sites are predominantly Simple to access
| Mean recommended tier | |
|---|---|
| All sites | 1.34 |
A mean recommended tier of 1.34 and a median of Simple place Ecology & Environment toward the easier end of the sectors surveyed. 74% of sites are Simple to access; 5% require Moderate or above.
Simple tier covers more than three-quarters of Ecology & Environment sites
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 1 - Simple | 74% |
| 2 - Easy | 21% |
| 3 - Moderate | 2% |
| 4 - Complex | 3% |
| 5 - Advanced | 0% |
Simple (74%) is the most common tier. Simple and Easy together account for 95% of sites, while 2% land at Moderate and 3% at Complex or Advanced.
robots.txt
Around three-quarters of Ecology & Environment sites publish a robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Publish a valid robots.txt | 76% |
76% of Ecology & Environment sites have a valid robots.txt. The remaining 24% leave crawl policy entirely undefined — a meaningful gap for a sector of this scale.
Most Ecology & Environment sites name one bot or none in their robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 | 38% |
| 1 | 38% |
| 2–4 | 9% |
| 5–9 | 5% |
| 10–15 | 2% |
| 16+ | 8% |
38% of Ecology & Environment sites name zero agents and 38% name one. A mean of 6.8 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 Ecology & Environment
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| AI crawlers | 12% |
| SEO / search indexing | 8% |
| SEO audit tools | 8% |
| Commercial scrapers | 6% |
| Social / content scrapers | 4% |
| Archive / research crawlers | 6% |
| Monitoring / uptime bots | 0% |
AI crawlers are named in 12% of Ecology & Environment robots.txt files, followed by SEO / search indexing at 8%. All figures are percentages of all 100 sites including those with no robots.txt.
Uniform per-agent rules dominate Ecology & Environment robots.txt files
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Uniform per-agent rules | 47% |
| Path-level mixed rules | 23% |
| Allow-only (no Disallow rules) | 2% |
| Mixed AI posture | 1% |
| Blanket Disallow: / | 3% |
Uniform per-agent rules lead at 47%, with path-level mixed rules at 23%. Mixed AI posture (1%) and blanket Disallow (3%) are minimal.
AI crawlers are among the most-targeted agents in Ecology & Environment robots.txt
| Disallowed | Allowed (whitelisted) | |
|---|---|---|
| * | 58% | 26% |
| ClaudeBot | 7% | 1% |
| GPTBot | 7% | 1% |
| Amazonbot | 6% | — |
| CCBot | 6% | — |
| psbot | 6% | — |
| AhrefsBot | 6% | — |
| Applebot-Extended | 5% | — |
| Bytespider | 5% | — |
| Google-Extended | 5% | — |
| ChatGPT-User | 3% | 2% |
| Claude-Web | 4% | — |
| Diffbot | 4% | — |
| FacebookBot | 4% | — |
| PerplexityBot | 4% | — |
| anthropic-ai | 4% | — |
| cohere-ai | 4% | — |
| meta-externalagent | 4% | — |
| omgili | 4% | — |
| omgilibot | 4% | — |
| ia_archiver | 4% | — |
| FriendlyCrawler | 3% | — |
| ImagesiftBot | 3% | — |
| Meta-ExternalAgent | 3% | — |
| Scrapy | 3% | — |
Values are percentages of all 100 Ecology & Environment sites surveyed. The wildcard (*) leads at 58% Disallow. Among named agents, ClaudeBot, GPTBot lead the Disallow list — reflecting direct targeting of AI training and indexing bots.
Industry Cohort
Ecology & Environment leads the Construction & Environment cohort on AI-blocking policy
| WAF | Antibot | CAPTCHA | JavaScript | Rate Limit | TLS | robots.txt | Blocks AI | Tier | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Construction & Maintenance | 94% | 21% | 24% | 52% | 29% | 9% | 75% | 7% | Tier 2 |
| Ecology & Environment | 90% | 13% | 13% | 42% | 16% | 13% | 76% | 10% | Tier 1 |
Ecology & Environment's 10% AI-blocking rate in robots.txt is the highest in the Construction & Environment cohort. WAF (90%) and JavaScript (42%) sit at the cohort on technical barriers.