Overview
JavaScript leads Human Resources's secondary barrier stack above the norm
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 93% |
| Antibot | 24% |
| CAPTCHA | 25% |
| JavaScript | 38% |
| Rate Limiting | 20% |
| TLS | 14% |
WAF at 93% is the dominant barrier. JavaScript (38%) leads secondary coverage. The remaining barriers sit materially lower, giving Human Resources a narrow but defined secondary layer.
Barrier Landscape
WAF leads Human Resources at 93% — JavaScript is the main secondary layer
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 93% |
| Antibot | 24% |
| CAPTCHA | 25% |
| JavaScript | 38% |
| Rate Limiting | 20% |
| TLS | 14% |
| Has robots.txt | 70% |
| Blocks AI crawlers | 2% |
WAF dominates at 93%. JavaScript (38%) leads active secondary barriers, followed by CAPTCHA (25%). The remaining three barriers all sit at or below 24% — a concentrated rather than broadly stacked profile.
Human Resources's barrier counts are spread — no single configuration dominates
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 barriers | 6% |
| 1 barrier | 33% |
| 2 barriers | 32% |
| 3 barriers | 12% |
| 4 barriers | 7% |
| 5 barriers | 7% |
| 6 barriers | 3% |
Barrier counts vary widely across Human Resources sites. Single-barrier configurations are the modal count at 33%, but the distribution is broad. 29% of sites carry three or more.
Simple is the dominant access tier across Human Resources
| Mean recommended tier | |
|---|---|
| All sites | 1.71 |
A mean recommended tier of 1.71 and a median of Simple place Human Resources around the middle of the sectors surveyed. 51% of sites are Simple to access; 14% require Moderate or above.
Simple is the dominant tier in Human Resources, but Easy accounts for a significant share
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 1 - Simple | 51% |
| 2 - Easy | 35% |
| 3 - Moderate | 8% |
| 4 - Complex | 4% |
| 5 - Advanced | 2% |
Simple (51%) is the most common tier. Simple and Easy together account for 86% of sites, while 8% land at Moderate and 6% at Complex or Advanced.
robots.txt
Around seven in ten of Human Resources sites publish a robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Publish a valid robots.txt | 70% |
70% of Human Resources sites have a valid robots.txt. The remaining 30% leave crawl policy entirely undefined — a meaningful gap for a sector of this scale.
Most Human Resources sites name one bot or none in their robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 | 38% |
| 1 | 45% |
| 2–4 | 7% |
| 5–9 | 2% |
| 10–15 | 4% |
| 16+ | 4% |
38% of Human Resources sites name zero agents and 45% name one. A mean of 7.6 is pulled up by a small number of sites with extensive policies, while the median stays at 1.
SEO / search indexing draw the most robots.txt attention in Human Resources
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| AI crawlers | 5% |
| SEO / search indexing | 11% |
| SEO audit tools | 6% |
| Commercial scrapers | 4% |
| Social / content scrapers | 5% |
| Archive / research crawlers | 4% |
| Monitoring / uptime bots | 0% |
SEO / search indexing are named in 11% of Human Resources robots.txt files, followed by SEO audit tools at 6%. All figures are percentages of all 100 sites including those with no robots.txt.
Uniform per-agent rules dominate Human Resources robots.txt files
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Uniform per-agent rules | 35% |
| Path-level mixed rules | 25% |
| Allow-only (no Disallow rules) | 7% |
| Mixed AI posture | 1% |
| Blanket Disallow: / | 3% |
Uniform per-agent rules lead at 35%, with path-level mixed rules at 25%. Mixed AI posture (1%) and blanket Disallow (3%) are minimal.
PetalBot leads named Disallow rules in Human Resources robots.txt
| Disallowed | Allowed (whitelisted) | |
|---|---|---|
| * | 51% | 34% |
| GPTBot | 2% | 4% |
| Googlebot | 3% | 3% |
| Google-Extended | 2% | 3% |
| anthropic-ai | 2% | 3% |
| Baiduspider | 3% | 1% |
| PetalBot | 4% | — |
| Yandex | 4% | — |
| Bytespider | 2% | 1% |
| CCBot | 2% | 1% |
| MJ12bot | 3% | — |
| Mediapartners-Google | 1% | 2% |
| SemrushBot | 3% | — |
| LinkedInBot | 2% | 1% |
| ia_archiver | 2% | 1% |
| Amazonbot | 1% | 2% |
| Applebot-Extended | 1% | 2% |
| Claude-Web | 1% | 2% |
| GoogleOther | 1% | 2% |
| cohere-ai | 1% | 2% |
| ChatGPT-User | 0% | 3% |
| OAI-SearchBot | 0% | 3% |
| Diffbot | 2% | — |
| Exabot | 2% | — |
| BLEXBot | 2% | — |
Values are percentages of all 100 Human Resources sites surveyed. The wildcard (*) leads at 51% Disallow. Among named agents, PetalBot, Yandex, Googlebot are the most frequently targeted — focused on non-AI crawlers.
Industry Cohort
Human Resources is the most accessible sub-category in the Recruitment & HR cohort
| WAF | Antibot | CAPTCHA | JavaScript | Rate Limit | TLS | robots.txt | Blocks AI | Tier | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Human Resources | 93% | 24% | 25% | 38% | 20% | 14% | 70% | 2% | Tier 1 |
| Outsourcing | 96% | 11% | 18% | 28% | 15% | 12% | 79% | 2% | Tier 1 |
| Recruitment & Staffing | 88% | 21% | 18% | 39% | 18% | 18% | 76% | 15% | Tier 1 |
A median tier of Simple and mean of 1.60 make Human Resources the easiest to access programmatically within Recruitment & HR. WAF (93%) and AI blocking (2%) are in line with cohort peers.