Overview
JavaScript leads Import & Export's secondary barrier stack above the norm
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 93% |
| Antibot | 19% |
| CAPTCHA | 17% |
| JavaScript | 35% |
| Rate Limiting | 17% |
| TLS | 13% |
WAF at 93% is the dominant barrier. JavaScript (35%) leads secondary coverage. The remaining barriers sit materially lower, giving Import & Export a narrow but defined secondary layer.
Barrier Landscape
WAF leads Import & Export at 93% — JavaScript is the main secondary layer
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 93% |
| Antibot | 19% |
| CAPTCHA | 17% |
| JavaScript | 35% |
| Rate Limiting | 17% |
| TLS | 13% |
| Has robots.txt | 69% |
| Blocks AI crawlers | 6% |
WAF dominates at 93%. JavaScript (35%) leads active secondary barriers, followed by Antibot (19%). The remaining three barriers all sit at or below 17% — a concentrated rather than broadly stacked profile.
Import & Export's barrier counts are spread — no single configuration dominates
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 barriers | 7% |
| 1 barrier | 36% |
| 2 barriers | 26% |
| 3 barriers | 22% |
| 4 barriers | 5% |
| 5 barriers | 4% |
| 6 barriers | 0% |
Barrier counts vary widely across Import & Export sites. Single-barrier configurations are the modal count at 36%, but the distribution is broad. 31% of sites carry three or more.
Simple is the dominant access tier across Import & Export
| Mean recommended tier | |
|---|---|
| All sites | 1.46 |
A mean recommended tier of 1.46 and a median of Simple place Import & Export toward the easier end of the sectors surveyed. 69% of sites are Simple to access; 8% require Moderate or above.
Simple tier covers more than two-thirds of Import & Export sites
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 1 - Simple | 68.7% |
| 2 - Easy | 23.2% |
| 3 - Moderate | 3% |
| 4 - Complex | 3% |
| 5 - Advanced | 2% |
Simple (69%) is the most common tier. Simple and Easy together account for 92% of sites, while 3% land at Moderate and 5% at Complex or Advanced.
robots.txt
Around seven in ten of Import & Export sites publish a robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Publish a valid robots.txt | 69% |
69% of Import & Export sites have a valid robots.txt. The remaining 31% leave crawl policy entirely undefined — a meaningful gap for a sector of this scale.
Most Import & Export sites name one bot or none in their robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 | 39% |
| 1 | 42% |
| 2–4 | 8% |
| 5–9 | 5% |
| 10–15 | 2% |
| 16+ | 4% |
39% of Import & Export sites name zero agents and 42% name one. A mean of 3.8 is pulled up by a small number of sites with extensive policies, while the median stays at 1.
SEO / search indexing and SEO audit tools draw near-equal attention in Import & Export robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| AI crawlers | 7% |
| SEO / search indexing | 11% |
| SEO audit tools | 11% |
| Commercial scrapers | 3% |
| Social / content scrapers | 1% |
| Archive / research crawlers | 3% |
| Monitoring / uptime bots | 1% |
SEO / search indexing appears in 11% of Import & Export sites; SEO audit tools 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 Import & Export robots.txt files
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Uniform per-agent rules | 33% |
| Path-level mixed rules | 29% |
| Allow-only (no Disallow rules) | 5% |
| Mixed AI posture | 2% |
| Blanket Disallow: / | 2% |
Uniform per-agent rules lead at 33%, with path-level mixed rules at 29%. Mixed AI posture (2%) and blanket Disallow (2%) are minimal.
MJ12bot leads named Disallow rules in Import & Export robots.txt
| Disallowed | Allowed (whitelisted) | |
|---|---|---|
| * | 51% | 34% |
| AdsBot-Google | 4% | 4% |
| Googlebot | 3% | 5% |
| AdsBot-Google-Mobile | 3% | 3% |
| MJ12bot | 6% | — |
| Googlebot-Image | 4% | 2% |
| ClaudeBot | 3% | 2% |
| GPTBot | 3% | 2% |
| YandexBot | 2% | 3% |
| SemrushBot | 3% | 2% |
| Bytespider | 4% | — |
| Baiduspider | 1% | 3% |
| GoogleOther | 2% | 2% |
| Amazonbot | 3% | — |
| PetalBot | 3% | — |
| CCBot | 3% | — |
| ChatGPT-User | 1% | 2% |
| Mediapartners-Google | 1% | 2% |
| Storebot-Google | 1% | 2% |
| bingbot | 1% | 2% |
| Google-Extended | 2% | 1% |
| DuckDuckBot | 0% | 3% |
| 80bot | 2% | — |
| YahooSeeker | 2% | — |
| Yandex | 1% | 1% |
Values are percentages of all 100 Import & Export sites surveyed. The wildcard (*) leads at 51% Disallow. Among named agents, MJ12bot, AdsBot-Google, Googlebot-Image are the most frequently targeted — focused on non-AI crawlers.
Industry Cohort
Import & Export sits mid-table within the Manufacturing & Logistics cohort
| WAF | Antibot | CAPTCHA | JavaScript | Rate Limit | TLS | robots.txt | Blocks AI | Tier | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aerospace & Defense | 87% | 17% | 26% | 36% | 21% | 15% | 67% | 6% | Tier 1 |
| Chemicals | 83% | 8% | 19% | 31% | 7% | 8% | 71% | 8% | Tier 1 |
| Civil Engineering | 89% | 13% | 22% | 38% | 19% | 14% | 60% | 5% | Tier 1 |
| Import & Export | 93% | 19% | 17% | 35% | 17% | 13% | 69% | 6% | Tier 1 |
| Machinery | 91% | 13% | 17% | 49% | 20% | 15% | 80% | 10% | Tier 2 |
| Mail & Package Delivery | 91% | 15% | 19% | 37% | 17% | 15% | 70% | 3% | Tier 1 |
| Manufacturing | 92% | 20% | 19% | 45% | 24% | 18% | 75% | 9% | Tier 2 |
| Maritime | 87% | 22% | 24% | 41% | 19% | 12% | 62% | 8% | Tier 1 |
| Metals & Mining | 87% | 26% | 30% | 39% | 25% | 16% | 72% | 4% | Tier 1 |
| Plastics & Polymers | 98% | 10% | 29% | 34% | 13% | 10% | 80% | 4% | Tier 1 |
| Transportation & Logistics | 78% | 15% | 16% | 35% | 17% | 18% | 67% | 2% | Tier 1 |
| Warehousing | 98% | 18% | 27% | 38% | 22% | 8% | 75% | 4% | Tier 1 |
Across Manufacturing & Logistics, Import & Export's barrier rates are broadly in line with peers. WAF at 93%, JavaScript at 35%, and AI blocking at 6% all sit near the cohort median. Tier difficulty (mean 1.35) is below the group average.