Overview
JavaScript and Rate Limiting both elevate Food & Beverages's active barrier profile
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 92% |
| Antibot | 24% |
| CAPTCHA | 26% |
| JavaScript | 51% |
| Rate Limiting | 31% |
| TLS | 11% |
WAF leads at 92%. JavaScript (51%) and Rate Limiting (31%) together form a multi-layer active stack — more than most sectors deploy alongside WAF.
Barrier Landscape
JavaScript and Rate Limiting define Food & Beverages's layered active defences
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 92% |
| Antibot | 24% |
| CAPTCHA | 26% |
| JavaScript | 51% |
| Rate Limiting | 31% |
| TLS | 11% |
| Has robots.txt | 68% |
| Blocks AI crawlers | 23% |
WAF leads at 92%. JavaScript (51%) and Rate Limiting (31%) are both well above the cross-sector norm, giving Food & Beverages a markedly heavier active barrier profile than most sectors.
Food & Beverages's barrier counts are spread — no single configuration dominates
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 barriers | 7% |
| 1 barrier | 26% |
| 2 barriers | 25% |
| 3 barriers | 21% |
| 4 barriers | 9% |
| 5 barriers | 12% |
| 6 barriers | 0% |
Barrier counts vary widely across Food & Beverages sites. Single-barrier configurations are the modal count at 26%, but the distribution is broad. 42% of sites carry three or more.
Food & Beverages is predominantly Easy to access — with a notable Moderate minority
| Mean recommended tier | |
|---|---|
| All sites | 2.09 |
A mean recommended tier of 2.09 and a median of Easy place Food & Beverages around the middle of the sectors surveyed. 33% of sites are Simple to access; 30% require Moderate or above.
Easy is the most common access tier across Food & Beverages sites
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 1 - Simple | 33% |
| 2 - Easy | 37% |
| 3 - Moderate | 19% |
| 4 - Complex | 10% |
| 5 - Advanced | 1% |
Easy (37%) is the most common tier. Simple and Easy together account for 70% of sites, while 19% land at Moderate and 11% at Complex or Advanced.
robots.txt
Around seven in ten of Food & Beverages sites publish a robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Publish a valid robots.txt | 68% |
68% of Food & Beverages sites have a valid robots.txt. The remaining 32% leave crawl policy entirely undefined — a meaningful gap for a sector of this scale.
Most Food & Beverages sites name one bot or none in their robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 | 37% |
| 1 | 27% |
| 2–4 | 13% |
| 5–9 | 8% |
| 10–15 | 2% |
| 16+ | 13% |
37% of Food & Beverages sites name zero agents and 27% name one. A mean of 4.3 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 Food & Beverages
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| AI crawlers | 23% |
| SEO / search indexing | 11% |
| SEO audit tools | 6% |
| Commercial scrapers | 11% |
| Social / content scrapers | 4% |
| Archive / research crawlers | 5% |
| Monitoring / uptime bots | 0% |
AI crawlers are mentioned by 23% of Food & Beverages sites — the leading bot category. SEO / search indexing and Commercial scrapers are tied at 11%. Figures are percentages of all 100 Food & Beverages sites including those with no robots.txt.
Uniform per-agent rules dominate Food & Beverages robots.txt files
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Uniform per-agent rules | 38% |
| Path-level mixed rules | 28% |
| Allow-only (no Disallow rules) | 0% |
| Mixed AI posture | 4% |
| Blanket Disallow: / | 1% |
Uniform per-agent rules lead at 38%, with path-level mixed rules at 28%. Mixed AI posture (4%) and blanket Disallow (1%) are minimal.
AI crawlers are among the most-targeted agents in Food & Beverages robots.txt
| Disallowed | Allowed (whitelisted) | |
|---|---|---|
| * | 59% | 29% |
| GPTBot | 20% | 2% |
| CCBot | 19% | — |
| ClaudeBot | 15% | — |
| OAI-SearchBot | 11% | 3% |
| ChatGPT-User | 9% | 4% |
| anthropic-ai | 12% | — |
| Claude-Web | 11% | — |
| PerplexityBot | 10% | 1% |
| ImagesiftBot | 9% | — |
| cohere-ai | 9% | — |
| omgili | 9% | — |
| omgilibot | 8% | — |
| Bytespider | 8% | — |
| FriendlyCrawler | 7% | — |
| Perplexity-User | 7% | — |
| Applebot-Extended | 7% | — |
| Google-Extended | 7% | — |
| Quora-Bot | 6% | — |
| news-please | 6% | — |
| Googlebot | 2% | 3% |
| Yandex | 3% | 2% |
| ia_archiver | 4% | — |
| Amazonbot | 4% | — |
| meta-externalagent | 4% | — |
Values are percentages of all 100 Food & Beverages sites surveyed. The wildcard (*) leads at 59% Disallow. Among named agents, GPTBot, CCBot lead the Disallow list — reflecting direct targeting of AI training and indexing bots.
Industry Cohort
Food & Beverages 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, Food & Beverages's barrier rates are broadly in line with peers. WAF at 92%, JavaScript at 51%, and AI blocking at 23% all sit near the cohort median. Tier difficulty (mean 1.93) is above the group average.