Overview
JavaScript leads Legal's secondary barrier stack above the norm
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 83% |
| Antibot | 15% |
| CAPTCHA | 22% |
| JavaScript | 35% |
| Rate Limiting | 15% |
| TLS | 8% |
WAF at 83% is the dominant barrier. JavaScript (35%) leads secondary coverage. The remaining barriers sit materially lower, giving Legal a narrow but defined secondary layer.
Barrier Landscape
WAF leads Legal at 83% — JavaScript is the main secondary layer
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 83% |
| Antibot | 15% |
| CAPTCHA | 22% |
| JavaScript | 35% |
| Rate Limiting | 15% |
| TLS | 8% |
| Has robots.txt | 58% |
| Blocks AI crawlers | 5% |
WAF dominates at 83%. JavaScript (35%) leads active secondary barriers, followed by CAPTCHA (22%). The remaining three barriers all sit at or below 15% — a concentrated rather than broadly stacked profile.
Legal's barrier counts are spread — no single configuration dominates
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 barriers | 13% |
| 1 barrier | 36% |
| 2 barriers | 30% |
| 3 barriers | 9% |
| 4 barriers | 6% |
| 5 barriers | 5% |
| 6 barriers | 1% |
Barrier counts vary widely across Legal sites. Single-barrier configurations are the modal count at 36%, but the distribution is broad. 21% of sites carry three or more.
Simple is the dominant access tier in Legal, with Easy a clear second
| Mean recommended tier | |
|---|---|
| All sites | 1.74 |
A mean recommended tier of 1.74 and a median of Easy place Legal around the middle of the sectors surveyed. 48% of sites are Simple to access; 17% require Moderate or above.
Simple is the dominant tier in Legal, but Easy accounts for a significant share
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 1 - Simple | 47.5% |
| 2 - Easy | 35.4% |
| 3 - Moderate | 13.1% |
| 4 - Complex | 4% |
| 5 - Advanced | 0% |
Simple (48%) is the most common tier. Simple and Easy together account for 83% of sites, while 13% land at Moderate and 4% at Complex or Advanced.
robots.txt
Nearly two-thirds of Legal sites publish any robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Publish a valid robots.txt | 58% |
Only 58% of Legal sites have a valid robots.txt. Nearly 42% leave crawl policy undefined — one of the lower coverage rates across surveyed sectors.
More than half of Legal sites name no bot agents in robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 | 54% |
| 1 | 29% |
| 2–4 | 8% |
| 5–9 | 8% |
| 10–15 | 0% |
| 16+ | 1% |
54% of Legal sites name zero bot agents; 29% name exactly one. A mean of 1.5 named agents and median of 0 reflect minimal engagement with named bot policy across the sector.
SEO / search indexing draw the most robots.txt attention in Legal
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| AI crawlers | 5% |
| SEO / search indexing | 7% |
| SEO audit tools | 2% |
| Commercial scrapers | 1% |
| Social / content scrapers | 1% |
| Archive / research crawlers | 1% |
| Monitoring / uptime bots | 0% |
SEO / search indexing are named in 7% of Legal robots.txt files, followed by AI crawlers at 5%. All figures are percentages of all 100 sites including those with no robots.txt.
Uniform per-agent rules dominate Legal robots.txt files
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Uniform per-agent rules | 41% |
| Path-level mixed rules | 12% |
| Allow-only (no Disallow rules) | 2% |
| Mixed AI posture | 1% |
| Blanket Disallow: / | 2% |
Uniform per-agent rules lead at 41%, with path-level mixed rules at 12%. Mixed AI posture (1%) and blanket Disallow (2%) are minimal.
AI crawlers are among the most-targeted agents in Legal robots.txt
| Disallowed | Allowed (whitelisted) | |
|---|---|---|
| * | 41% | 17% |
| Googlebot | 5% | 3% |
| Google-Extended | 4% | — |
| GPTBot | 4% | — |
| Amazonbot | 3% | — |
| Bytespider | 3% | — |
| Googlebot-Image | 2% | 1% |
| ChatGPT-User | 2% | 1% |
| ClaudeBot | 3% | — |
| PerplexityBot | 2% | 1% |
| ia_archiver | 1% | 1% |
| 008 | 2% | — |
| Applebot-Extended | 2% | — |
| CCBot | 2% | — |
| OAI-SearchBot | 1% | 1% |
| meta-externalagent | 2% | — |
| gsa-crawler | 1% | 1% |
| CSS Validator: Jigsaw/2.3.0 W3C_CSS_Validator_JFouffa/2.0 | 1% | — |
| HTML validator: Siteimprove_W3C_Validator/1.3 | 1% | — |
| Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/6.0) LinkCheck by Siteimprove.com | 1% | — |
| Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/6.0) SiteCheck-sitecrawl by Siteimprove.com | 1% | — |
| AhrefsBot | 1% | — |
| SemrushBot | 1% | — |
| Bytedance | 1% | — |
| Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; archive.org_bot; +http://www.archive.org/details/archive.org_bot) | 1% | — |
Values are percentages of all 100 Legal sites surveyed. The wildcard (*) leads at 41% Disallow. Among named agents, Googlebot leads with 5 Disallow mentions; Google-Extended and GPTBot follow at 4 each — reflecting direct targeting of search indexing and AI training bots.
Industry Cohort
Legal is among the hardest sub-categories to access in Legal & Professional Services
| WAF | Antibot | CAPTCHA | JavaScript | Rate Limit | TLS | robots.txt | Blocks AI | Tier | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Consulting | 87% | 9% | 22% | 37% | 8% | 11% | 75% | 5% | Tier 1 |
| Customer Services | 100% | 22% | 22% | 55% | 38% | 17% | 76% | 7% | Tier 1 |
| Facilities Services | 94% | 9% | 23% | 27% | 12% | 10% | 75% | 1% | Tier 1 |
| Legal | 83% | 15% | 22% | 35% | 15% | 8% | 58% | 5% | Tier 2 |
A median tier of Simple and mean of 1.65 make Legal one of the harder sectors within Legal & Professional Services to access programmatically. JavaScript (35%) is elevated in the cohort.