Overview
JavaScript leads Machinery's secondary barrier stack above the norm
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 91% |
| Antibot | 13% |
| CAPTCHA | 17% |
| JavaScript | 49% |
| Rate Limiting | 20% |
| TLS | 15% |
WAF at 91% is the dominant barrier. JavaScript (49%) leads secondary coverage. The remaining barriers sit materially lower, giving Machinery a narrow but defined secondary layer.
Barrier Landscape
JavaScript is Machinery's dominant secondary barrier by a wide margin
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 91% |
| Antibot | 13% |
| CAPTCHA | 17% |
| JavaScript | 49% |
| Rate Limiting | 20% |
| TLS | 15% |
| Has robots.txt | 80% |
| Blocks AI crawlers | 10% |
WAF at 91% and JavaScript at 49% together form the sector's main defensive layer. Rate Limiting (20%) follows at a distance. The barrier profile is concentrated rather than broadly spread.
Two-barrier stacks are Machinery's most common security posture
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 barriers | 5% |
| 1 barrier | 32% |
| 2 barriers | 34% |
| 3 barriers | 18% |
| 4 barriers | 5% |
| 5 barriers | 5% |
| 6 barriers | 1% |
34% of Machinery sites carry exactly 2 barriers. 29% stack three or more. 5% carry none — a low share of unprotected sites for this sector.
Simple is the dominant access tier across Machinery
| Mean recommended tier | |
|---|---|
| All sites | 1.61 |
A mean recommended tier of 1.61 and a median of Easy place Machinery around the middle of the sectors surveyed. 50% of sites are Simple to access; 9% require Moderate or above.
Simple is the dominant tier in Machinery, but Easy accounts for a significant share
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 1 - Simple | 49.5% |
| 2 - Easy | 41.4% |
| 3 - Moderate | 8.1% |
| 4 - Complex | 1% |
| 5 - Advanced | 0% |
Simple (50%) is the most common tier. Simple and Easy together account for 91% of sites, while 8% land at Moderate and 1% at Complex or Advanced.
robots.txt
Nearly four in five of Machinery sites publish a robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Publish a valid robots.txt | 80% |
80% of Machinery sites have a valid robots.txt. The remaining 20% leave crawl policy entirely undefined — a meaningful gap for a sector of this scale.
Machinery sites name a handful of agents in robots.txt — few commit to comprehensive policies
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 | 25% |
| 1 | 45% |
| 2–4 | 14% |
| 5–9 | 7% |
| 10–15 | 3% |
| 16+ | 6% |
The mean of 9.7 named agents reflects limited bot-policy investment in Machinery. 25% of sites name no agents; 45% name exactly one. Only 6% maintain a list of 16 or more named bots.
SEO audit tools and AI crawlers draw near-equal attention in Machinery robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| AI crawlers | 13% |
| SEO / search indexing | 12% |
| SEO audit tools | 14% |
| Commercial scrapers | 1% |
| Social / content scrapers | 1% |
| Archive / research crawlers | 3% |
| Monitoring / uptime bots | 0% |
SEO audit tools appears in 14% of Machinery sites; AI crawlers in 13%. 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 Machinery robots.txt files
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Uniform per-agent rules | 54% |
| Path-level mixed rules | 21% |
| Allow-only (no Disallow rules) | 5% |
| Mixed AI posture | 0% |
| Blanket Disallow: / | 0% |
Uniform per-agent rules lead at 54%, with path-level mixed rules at 21%. Mixed AI posture (0%) and blanket Disallow (0%) are minimal.
AhrefsBot leads named Disallow rules in Machinery robots.txt
| Disallowed | Allowed (whitelisted) | |
|---|---|---|
| * | 67% | 24% |
| AhrefsBot | 10% | — |
| Googlebot | 7% | 1% |
| MJ12bot | 8% | — |
| Bytespider | 7% | — |
| PetalBot | 7% | — |
| Yandex | 6% | 1% |
| BLEXBot | 7% | — |
| dotbot | 6% | — |
| Mediapartners-Google | 3% | 3% |
| CCBot | 5% | — |
| Amazonbot | 5% | — |
| SiteSnagger | 4% | — |
| Teleport | 4% | — |
| TeleportPro | 4% | — |
| WebCopier | 4% | — |
| WebStripper | 4% | — |
| moget | 4% | — |
| TurnitinBot | 4% | — |
| Baiduspider | 4% | — |
| AdIdxBot | 2% | 2% |
| AdsBot-Google | 2% | 2% |
| AdsBot-Google-Mobile | 2% | 2% |
| facebookcatalog/1.0 | 3% | — |
| grub-client | 3% | — |
Values are percentages of all 100 Machinery sites surveyed. The wildcard (*) leads at 67% Disallow. Among named agents, AhrefsBot, MJ12bot, Googlebot are the most frequently targeted — focused on non-AI crawlers.
Industry Cohort
Machinery leads the Manufacturing & Logistics cohort on AI-blocking policy
| 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 |
Machinery's 10% AI-blocking rate in robots.txt is the highest in the Manufacturing & Logistics cohort. WAF (91%) and JavaScript (49%) sit mid-table in the cohort on technical barriers.