Overview
JavaScript and CAPTCHA both elevate Equipment & Supplies's active barrier profile
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 96% |
| Antibot | 27% |
| CAPTCHA | 31% |
| JavaScript | 41% |
| Rate Limiting | 26% |
| TLS | 14% |
WAF leads at 96%. JavaScript (41%) and CAPTCHA (31%) together form a multi-layer active stack — more than most sectors deploy alongside WAF.
Barrier Landscape
WAF leads Equipment & Supplies at 96% — JavaScript is the main secondary layer
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 96% |
| Antibot | 27% |
| CAPTCHA | 31% |
| JavaScript | 41% |
| Rate Limiting | 26% |
| TLS | 14% |
| Has robots.txt | 68% |
| Blocks AI crawlers | 8% |
WAF dominates at 96%. JavaScript (41%) leads active secondary barriers, followed by CAPTCHA (31%). The remaining three barriers all sit at or below 27% — a concentrated rather than broadly stacked profile.
Two-barrier stacks are Equipment & Supplies's most common security posture
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 barriers | 4% |
| 1 barrier | 23% |
| 2 barriers | 32% |
| 3 barriers | 25% |
| 4 barriers | 7% |
| 5 barriers | 9% |
| 6 barriers | 0% |
32% of Equipment & Supplies sites carry exactly 2 barriers. 41% stack three or more. 4% carry none — a low share of unprotected sites for this sector.
Equipment & Supplies is predominantly Easy to access — with a notable Moderate minority
| Mean recommended tier | |
|---|---|
| All sites | 1.88 |
A mean recommended tier of 1.88 and a median of Easy place Equipment & Supplies around the middle of the sectors surveyed. 40% of sites are Simple to access; 23% require Moderate or above.
Simple and Easy cover most Equipment & Supplies sites
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 1 - Simple | 40% |
| 2 - Easy | 37% |
| 3 - Moderate | 20% |
| 4 - Complex | 1% |
| 5 - Advanced | 2% |
Simple (40%) is the most common tier. Simple and Easy together account for 77% of sites, while 20% land at Moderate and 3% at Complex or Advanced.
robots.txt
Around seven in ten of Equipment & Supplies sites publish a robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Publish a valid robots.txt | 68% |
68% of Equipment & Supplies sites have a valid robots.txt. The remaining 32% leave crawl policy entirely undefined — a meaningful gap for a sector of this scale.
Equipment & Supplies sites name a handful of agents in robots.txt — few commit to comprehensive policies
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 | 33% |
| 1 | 28% |
| 2–4 | 18% |
| 5–9 | 14% |
| 10–15 | 4% |
| 16+ | 3% |
The mean of 4.6 named agents reflects limited bot-policy investment in Equipment & Supplies. 33% of sites name no agents; 28% name exactly one. Only 3% maintain a list of 16 or more named bots.
SEO audit tools lead Equipment & Supplies's robots.txt mentions ahead of AI crawlers
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| AI crawlers | 10% |
| SEO / search indexing | 12% |
| SEO audit tools | 19% |
| Commercial scrapers | 0% |
| Social / content scrapers | 1% |
| Archive / research crawlers | 1% |
| Monitoring / uptime bots | 0% |
SEO audit tools are mentioned by 19% of Equipment & Supplies sites — the leading bot category, ahead of AI crawlers at 10%. Figures are percentages of all 100 sites surveyed.
Uniform per-agent rules dominate Equipment & Supplies robots.txt files
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Uniform per-agent rules | 45% |
| Path-level mixed rules | 20% |
| Allow-only (no Disallow rules) | 1% |
| Mixed AI posture | 0% |
| Blanket Disallow: / | 2% |
Uniform per-agent rules lead at 45%, with path-level mixed rules at 20%. Mixed AI posture (0%) and blanket Disallow (2%) are minimal.
AhrefsBot leads named Disallow rules in Equipment & Supplies robots.txt
| Disallowed | Allowed (whitelisted) | |
|---|---|---|
| * | 64% | 22% |
| AhrefsBot | 12% | — |
| Googlebot | 7% | 2% |
| Yandex | 8% | 1% |
| MJ12bot | 8% | — |
| Amazonbot | 5% | 1% |
| GPTBot | 6% | — |
| Nutch | 6% | — |
| AdsBot-Google | 4% | 2% |
| Google-Extended | 5% | — |
| AhrefsSiteAudit | 5% | — |
| adsbot-google | 5% | — |
| SemrushBot | 5% | — |
| PetalBot | 4% | — |
| BLEXBot | 4% | — |
| ClaudeBot | 4% | — |
| DataForSeoBot | 4% | — |
| Gigabot | 4% | — |
| ChatGPT-User | 3% | — |
| CCBot | 3% | — |
| dotbot | 3% | — |
| CazoodleBot | 3% | — |
| dotbot/1.0 | 3% | — |
| baidu | 2% | 1% |
| voltron | 2% | — |
Values are percentages of all 100 Equipment & Supplies sites surveyed. The wildcard (*) leads at 64% Disallow. Among named agents, AhrefsBot, Yandex, MJ12bot are the most frequently targeted — focused on non-AI crawlers.
Industry Cohort
Equipment & Supplies sits mid-table within the Retail & E-commerce cohort
| WAF | Antibot | CAPTCHA | JavaScript | Rate Limit | TLS | robots.txt | Blocks AI | Tier | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apparel & Fashion | 91% | 21% | 15% | 49% | 54% | 32% | 69% | 4% | Tier 3 |
| Beauty & Cosmetics | 91% | 30% | 36% | 40% | 31% | 30% | 76% | 13% | Tier 2 |
| Computer & Video Games | 94% | 27% | 26% | 44% | 22% | 13% | 81% | 23% | Tier 1 |
| Computer Hardware | 93% | 30% | 20% | 42% | 33% | 15% | 73% | 13% | Tier 2 |
| Computers & Electronics | 86% | 13% | 17% | 34% | 18% | 15% | 73% | 9% | Tier 2 |
| Consumer Electronics | 92% | 27% | 27% | 46% | 29% | 20% | 83% | 9% | Tier 2 |
| Equipment & Supplies | 96% | 27% | 31% | 41% | 26% | 14% | 68% | 8% | Tier 2 |
| Food & Beverages | 92% | 24% | 26% | 51% | 31% | 11% | 68% | 23% | Tier 2 |
| Furniture | 97% | 33% | 28% | 49% | 40% | 21% | 67% | 5% | Tier 2 |
| Jewelry & Luxury | 83% | 28% | 23% | 41% | 42% | 34% | 80% | 9% | Tier 2 |
| Packaging & Containers | 95% | 18% | 35% | 42% | 17% | 11% | 80% | 6% | Tier 1 |
| Retail | 96% | 19% | 15% | 51% | 33% | 20% | 85% | 29% | Tier 2 |
| Sporting Goods | 89% | 26% | 24% | 41% | 49% | 32% | 78% | 7% | Tier 2 |
| Sports | 98% | 11% | 15% | 61% | 23% | 11% | 89% | 33% | Tier 1 |
| Textiles & Nonwovens | 92% | 6% | 38% | 35% | 17% | 14% | 78% | 7% | Tier 1 |
| Tobacco | 98% | 30% | 52% | 38% | 30% | 15% | 76% | 3% | Tier 1 |
| Wholesalers & Liquidators | 94% | 24% | 22% | 44% | 30% | 13% | 80% | 7% | Tier 2 |
| Wine & Spirits | 95% | 24% | 28% | 47% | 32% | 15% | 84% | 14% | Tier 1 |
Across Retail & E-commerce, Equipment & Supplies's barrier rates are broadly in line with peers. WAF at 96%, JavaScript at 41%, and AI blocking at 8% all sit near the cohort median. Tier difficulty (mean 1.81) is above the group average.