Overview
JavaScript leads Foreign Language's secondary barrier stack above the norm
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 96% |
| Antibot | 15% |
| CAPTCHA | 20% |
| JavaScript | 42% |
| Rate Limiting | 14% |
| TLS | 13% |
WAF at 96% is the dominant barrier. JavaScript (42%) leads secondary coverage. The remaining barriers sit materially lower, giving Foreign Language a narrow but defined secondary layer.
Barrier Landscape
WAF leads Foreign Language at 96% — JavaScript is the main secondary layer
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 96% |
| Antibot | 15% |
| CAPTCHA | 20% |
| JavaScript | 42% |
| Rate Limiting | 14% |
| TLS | 13% |
| Has robots.txt | 82% |
| Blocks AI crawlers | 6% |
WAF dominates at 96%. JavaScript (42%) leads active secondary barriers, followed by CAPTCHA (20%). The remaining three barriers all sit at or below 15% — a concentrated rather than broadly stacked profile.
Two-barrier stacks are Foreign Language's most common security posture
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 barriers | 2% |
| 1 barrier | 38% |
| 2 barriers | 43% |
| 3 barriers | 3% |
| 4 barriers | 4% |
| 5 barriers | 9% |
| 6 barriers | 1% |
43% of Foreign Language sites carry exactly 2 barriers. 17% stack three or more. 2% carry none — a low share of unprotected sites for this sector.
Nearly all Foreign Language sites are Simple to access programmatically
| Mean recommended tier | |
|---|---|
| All sites | 1.14 |
A mean recommended tier of 1.14 and a median of Simple place Foreign Language among the most accessible sectors surveyed. 91% of sites are Simple to access; 2% require Moderate or above.
Simple tier covers more than three-quarters of Foreign Language sites
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 1 - Simple | 90.9% |
| 2 - Easy | 7.1% |
| 3 - Moderate | 0% |
| 4 - Complex | 1% |
| 5 - Advanced | 1% |
Simple (91%) is the most common tier. Simple and Easy together account for 98% of sites, while 0% land at Moderate and 2% at Complex or Advanced.
robots.txt
Most Foreign Language sites publish a robots.txt — coverage above the norm
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Publish a valid robots.txt | 82% |
82% of Foreign Language sites publish a valid robots.txt. The 18% without a file leave crawl policy undefined — a lower gap than the cross-sector average of around 24%.
Foreign Language's robots.txt files show moderate engagement with named bot policy
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 | 33% |
| 1 | 38% |
| 2–4 | 14% |
| 5–9 | 8% |
| 10–15 | 3% |
| 16+ | 4% |
A mean of 10.5 named agents reflects moderate bot-policy investment in Foreign Language. 33% of sites name no agents; 4% name 16 or more. The median of 1 stays low.
SEO audit tools and SEO / search indexing draw near-equal attention in Foreign Language robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| AI crawlers | 8% |
| SEO / search indexing | 11% |
| SEO audit tools | 12% |
| Commercial scrapers | 6% |
| Social / content scrapers | 4% |
| Archive / research crawlers | 5% |
| Monitoring / uptime bots | 0% |
SEO audit tools appears in 12% of Foreign Language sites; SEO / search indexing in 11%. The near-equal split reflects a sector that treats both categories with comparable priority. Figures are percentages of all 100 sites.
Uniform per-agent rules dominate Foreign Language robots.txt files
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Uniform per-agent rules | 54% |
| Path-level mixed rules | 20% |
| Allow-only (no Disallow rules) | 6% |
| Mixed AI posture | 0% |
| Blanket Disallow: / | 2% |
Uniform per-agent rules lead at 54%, with path-level mixed rules at 20%. Mixed AI posture (0%) and blanket Disallow (2%) are minimal.
Yandex leads named Disallow rules in Foreign Language robots.txt
| Disallowed | Allowed (whitelisted) | |
|---|---|---|
| * | 54% | 30% |
| Yandex | 8% | 1% |
| Twitterbot | 4% | 4% |
| GPTBot | 5% | 2% |
| Googlebot | 5% | 2% |
| Applebot | 3% | 3% |
| AdsBot-Google | 3% | 2% |
| SemrushBot | 5% | — |
| BLEXBot | 5% | — |
| facebookexternalhit | 2% | 2% |
| CCBot | 3% | 1% |
| MJ12bot | 4% | — |
| Google-Extended | 3% | 1% |
| Bytespider | 3% | — |
| TurnitinBot | 3% | — |
| ia_archiver | 3% | — |
| AhrefsBot | 3% | — |
| BotALot | 3% | — |
| BuiltBotTough | 3% | — |
| BunnySlippers | 3% | — |
| CheeseBot | 3% | — |
| CherryPicker | 3% | — |
| CopyRightCheck | 3% | — |
| Crescent | 3% | — |
| DittoSpyder | 3% | — |
Values are percentages of all 100 Foreign Language sites surveyed. The wildcard (*) leads at 54% Disallow. Among named agents, Yandex leads the Disallow list at 8%, ahead of GPTBot, Googlebot, SemrushBot, and BLEXBot at 5% each.
Industry Cohort
Foreign Language is the most accessible sub-category in 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 |
A median tier of Simple and mean of 1.09 make Foreign Language the easiest to access programmatically within Education. WAF (96%) and AI blocking (6%) are in line with cohort peers.