Overview
JavaScript leads Education's secondary barrier stack above the norm
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 98% |
| Antibot | 17% |
| CAPTCHA | 18% |
| JavaScript | 37% |
| Rate Limiting | 18% |
| TLS | 10% |
WAF at 98% is the dominant barrier. JavaScript (37%) leads secondary coverage. The remaining barriers sit materially lower, giving Education a narrow but defined secondary layer.
Barrier Landscape
WAF leads Education at 98% — JavaScript is the main secondary layer
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 98% |
| Antibot | 17% |
| CAPTCHA | 18% |
| JavaScript | 37% |
| Rate Limiting | 18% |
| TLS | 10% |
| Has robots.txt | 81% |
| Blocks AI crawlers | 15% |
WAF dominates at 98%. JavaScript (37%) leads active secondary barriers, followed by Rate Limiting (18%). The remaining three barriers all sit at or below 18% — a concentrated rather than broadly stacked profile.
Single-barrier configurations dominate Education — mostly WAF alone
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 barriers | 1% |
| 1 barrier | 44% |
| 2 barriers | 31% |
| 3 barriers | 13% |
| 4 barriers | 5% |
| 5 barriers | 3% |
| 6 barriers | 3% |
44% of Education sites carry exactly one barrier — almost always WAF. Two-barrier stacks add 31%. Just 24% of sites layer three or more defences.
Education is predominantly Easy to access — with a notable Moderate minority
| Mean recommended tier | |
|---|---|
| All sites | 1.74 |
A mean recommended tier of 1.74 and a median of Easy place Education around the middle of the sectors surveyed. 44% of sites are Simple to access; 11% require Moderate or above.
Easy is the most common access tier across Education sites
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 1 - Simple | 44% |
| 2 - Easy | 45% |
| 3 - Moderate | 5% |
| 4 - Complex | 5% |
| 5 - Advanced | 1% |
Easy (45%) is the most common tier. Simple and Easy together account for 89% of sites, while 5% land at Moderate and 6% at Complex or Advanced.
robots.txt
Most Education sites publish a robots.txt — coverage above the norm
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Publish a valid robots.txt | 81% |
81% of Education sites publish a valid robots.txt. The 19% without a file leave crawl policy undefined — a lower gap than the cross-sector average of around 24%.
Education sites name a handful of agents in robots.txt — few commit to comprehensive policies
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 | 25% |
| 1 | 33% |
| 2–4 | 7% |
| 5–9 | 20% |
| 10–15 | 6% |
| 16+ | 9% |
The mean of 5.0 named agents reflects limited bot-policy investment in Education. 25% of sites name no agents; 33% name exactly one. Only 9% maintain a list of 16 or more named bots.
Social / content scrapers draw the most robots.txt attention in Education
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| AI crawlers | 16% |
| SEO / search indexing | 8% |
| SEO audit tools | 7% |
| Commercial scrapers | 7% |
| Social / content scrapers | 24% |
| Archive / research crawlers | 3% |
| Monitoring / uptime bots | 0% |
Social / content scrapers are named in 24% of Education robots.txt files, followed by AI crawlers at 16%. All figures are percentages of all 100 sites including those with no robots.txt.
Path-level mixed rules dominate Education robots.txt posture
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Uniform per-agent rules | 34% |
| Path-level mixed rules | 41% |
| Allow-only (no Disallow rules) | 3% |
| Mixed AI posture | 4% |
| Blanket Disallow: / | 3% |
Path-level mixed rules lead at 41%, with uniform per-agent rules at 34%. Mixed AI posture reaches 4%.
facebookexternalhit and Yandex lead named Disallow rules in Education robots.txt
| Disallowed | Allowed (whitelisted) | |
|---|---|---|
| * | 68% | 45% |
| facebookexternalhit | 21% | 24% |
| Twitterbot | 20% | 22% |
| AdsBot-Google | 19% | 19% |
| Yandex | 21% | 1% |
| GPTBot | 13% | 2% |
| CCBot | 11% | 1% |
| Google-Extended | 10% | 1% |
| ClaudeBot | 9% | 1% |
| PerplexityBot | 7% | 2% |
| Applebot-Extended | 8% | 1% |
| ChatGPT-User | 6% | 2% |
| FacebookBot | 7% | 1% |
| anthropic-ai | 7% | 1% |
| meta-externalagent | 6% | 2% |
| Googlebot | 4% | 4% |
| Amazonbot | 6% | 1% |
| Bytespider | 7% | — |
| Claude-Web | 6% | 1% |
| OAI-SearchBot | 4% | 3% |
| cohere-ai | 6% | 1% |
| omgili | 5% | — |
| Diffbot | 5% | — |
| ImagesiftBot | 5% | — |
| Meta-ExternalAgent | 4% | 1% |
Values are percentages of all 100 Education sites surveyed. The wildcard (*) leads at 68% Disallow. Among named agents, facebookexternalhit, Yandex, Twitterbot are the most frequently targeted — focused on non-AI crawlers.
Industry Cohort
Education sits mid-table within the Education cohort
| WAF | Antibot | CAPTCHA | JavaScript | Rate Limit | TLS | robots.txt | Blocks AI | Tier | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Distance Learning | 97% | 27% | 37% | 43% | 26% | 16% | 85% | 25% | Tier 2 |
| Education | 98% | 17% | 18% | 37% | 18% | 10% | 81% | 15% | Tier 2 |
| Foreign Language | 96% | 15% | 20% | 42% | 14% | 13% | 82% | 6% | Tier 1 |
| Libraries | 92% | 16% | 9% | 36% | 16% | 11% | 69% | 8% | Tier 1 |
| Reference | 81% | 15% | 17% | 31% | 16% | 3% | 60% | 17% | Tier 1 |
| Science | 90% | 15% | 11% | 35% | 15% | 9% | 79% | 10% | Tier 2 |
| Training & Certification | 93% | 15% | 19% | 41% | 17% | 11% | 75% | 7% | Tier 1 |
Across Education, Education's barrier rates are broadly in line with peers. WAF at 98%, JavaScript at 37%, and AI blocking at 15% all sit near the cohort median. Tier difficulty (mean 1.62) is above the group average.