Overview
JavaScript leads Healthcare's secondary barrier stack above the norm
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 93% |
| Antibot | 17% |
| CAPTCHA | 21% |
| JavaScript | 35% |
| Rate Limiting | 27% |
| TLS | 21% |
WAF at 93% is the dominant barrier. JavaScript (35%) leads secondary coverage. The remaining barriers sit materially lower, giving Healthcare a narrow but defined secondary layer.
Barrier Landscape
WAF leads Healthcare at 93% — JavaScript is the main secondary layer
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 93% |
| Antibot | 17% |
| CAPTCHA | 21% |
| JavaScript | 35% |
| Rate Limiting | 27% |
| TLS | 21% |
| Has robots.txt | 78% |
| Blocks AI crawlers | 14% |
WAF dominates at 93%. JavaScript (35%) leads active secondary barriers, followed by Rate Limiting (27%). The remaining three barriers all sit at or below 21% — a concentrated rather than broadly stacked profile.
Healthcare's barrier counts are spread — no single configuration dominates
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 barriers | 7% |
| 1 barrier | 35% |
| 2 barriers | 27% |
| 3 barriers | 10% |
| 4 barriers | 11% |
| 5 barriers | 9% |
| 6 barriers | 1% |
Barrier counts vary widely across Healthcare sites. Single-barrier configurations are the modal count at 35%, but the distribution is broad. 31% of sites carry three or more.
Healthcare is Simple-dominant — with Easy accounting for a significant share
| Mean recommended tier | |
|---|---|
| All sites | 1.75 |
A mean recommended tier of 1.75 and a median of Easy place Healthcare around the middle of the sectors surveyed. 44% of sites are Simple to access; 11% require Moderate or above.
Simple is the dominant tier in Healthcare, but Easy accounts for a significant share
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 1 - Simple | 44% |
| 2 - Easy | 45% |
| 3 - Moderate | 5% |
| 4 - Complex | 4% |
| 5 - Advanced | 2% |
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
Nearly four in five Healthcare sites publish a robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Publish a valid robots.txt | 78% |
78% of Healthcare sites have a valid robots.txt. The remaining 22% leave crawl policy entirely undefined — a meaningful gap for a sector of this scale.
Healthcare's robots.txt files show moderate engagement with named bot policy
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 | 26% |
| 1 | 37% |
| 2–4 | 14% |
| 5–9 | 9% |
| 10–15 | 3% |
| 16+ | 11% |
A mean of 12.7 named agents reflects moderate bot-policy investment in Healthcare. 26% of sites name no agents; 11% name 16 or more. The median of 1 suggests a bimodal split.
AI crawlers draw the most robots.txt attention in Healthcare
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| AI crawlers | 14% |
| SEO / search indexing | 9% |
| SEO audit tools | 7% |
| Commercial scrapers | 9% |
| Social / content scrapers | 1% |
| Archive / research crawlers | 8% |
| Monitoring / uptime bots | 0% |
AI crawlers are named in 14% of Healthcare robots.txt files, followed by SEO / search indexing at 9%. All figures are percentages of all 100 sites including those with no robots.txt.
Uniform per-agent rules dominate Healthcare robots.txt files
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Uniform per-agent rules | 45% |
| Path-level mixed rules | 27% |
| Allow-only (no Disallow rules) | 4% |
| Mixed AI posture | 1% |
| Blanket Disallow: / | 1% |
Uniform per-agent rules lead at 45%, with path-level mixed rules at 27%. Mixed AI posture (1%) and blanket Disallow (1%) are minimal.
AI crawlers are among the most-targeted agents in Healthcare robots.txt
| Disallowed | Allowed (whitelisted) | |
|---|---|---|
| * | 68% | 29% |
| CCBot | 14% | — |
| GPTBot | 13% | — |
| ClaudeBot | 12% | — |
| anthropic-ai | 10% | — |
| PerplexityBot | 9% | 1% |
| omgili | 8% | — |
| ChatGPT-User | 7% | 1% |
| cohere-ai | 8% | — |
| Claude-Web | 7% | — |
| OAI-SearchBot | 6% | 1% |
| Perplexity-User | 6% | 1% |
| Offline Explorer | 6% | — |
| Bytespider | 5% | — |
| Diffbot | 5% | — |
| Timpibot | 5% | — |
| Webzio-Extended | 5% | — |
| AdsBot-Google | 3% | 2% |
| Amazonbot | 5% | — |
| Mediapartners-Google | 2% | 3% |
| omgilibot | 5% | — |
| FacebookBot | 4% | — |
| MSIECrawler | 4% | — |
| Meta-ExternalAgent | 4% | — |
| SiteSnagger | 4% | — |
Values are percentages of all 100 Healthcare sites surveyed. The wildcard (*) leads at 68% Disallow. Among named agents, CCBot, GPTBot lead the Disallow list — reflecting direct targeting of AI training and indexing bots.
Industry Cohort
Healthcare sits mid-table within the Healthcare cohort
| WAF | Antibot | CAPTCHA | JavaScript | Rate Limit | TLS | robots.txt | Blocks AI | Tier | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Healthcare | 93% | 17% | 21% | 35% | 27% | 21% | 78% | 14% | Tier 2 |
| Medical Devices & Equipment | 92% | 13% | 22% | 45% | 16% | 8% | 81% | 8% | Tier 1 |
| Mental Health | 95% | 16% | 24% | 40% | 18% | 6% | 85% | 12% | Tier 1 |
| Pharmaceuticals | 84% | 20% | 25% | 54% | 27% | 8% | 62% | 5% | Tier 1 |
| Veterinary | 100% | 24% | 29% | 43% | 35% | 25% | 89% | 5% | Tier 1 |
| Wellness | 98% | 23% | 31% | 48% | 34% | 16% | 83% | 22% | Tier 2 |
Across Healthcare, Healthcare's barrier rates are broadly in line with peers. WAF at 93%, JavaScript at 35%, and AI blocking at 14% all sit near the cohort median. Tier difficulty (mean 1.62) is above the group average.