Overview
Mass Media leads on AI-blocking policy — technical barriers stay modest
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 98% |
| Antibot | 12% |
| CAPTCHA | 21% |
| JavaScript | 49% |
| Rate Limiting | 16% |
| TLS | 8% |
WAF covers 98% of sites. JavaScript (49%) leads secondary barriers but 43% of sites block AI crawlers via robots.txt — a policy commitment that outpaces technical barrier deployment.
Barrier Landscape
Mass Media combines modest technical barriers with aggressive AI-blocking policy
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 98% |
| Antibot | 12% |
| CAPTCHA | 21% |
| JavaScript | 49% |
| Rate Limiting | 16% |
| TLS | 8% |
| Has robots.txt | 92% |
| Blocks AI crawlers | 43% |
WAF leads at 98%. JavaScript (49%) and CAPTCHA (21%) are the main active layers. 43% of sites block AI crawlers via robots.txt — a policy emphasis that leads most surveyed sectors.
Two-barrier stacks are Mass Media's most common security posture
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 barriers | 2% |
| 1 barrier | 34% |
| 2 barriers | 35% |
| 3 barriers | 21% |
| 4 barriers | 3% |
| 5 barriers | 5% |
| 6 barriers | 0% |
35% of Mass Media sites carry exactly 2 barriers. 29% stack three or more. 2% carry none — a low share of unprotected sites for this sector.
Mass Media is predominantly Easy to access — with a notable Moderate minority
| Mean recommended tier | |
|---|---|
| All sites | 2.02 |
A mean recommended tier of 2.02 and a median of Easy place Mass Media around the middle of the sectors surveyed. 34% of sites are Simple to access; 24% require Moderate or above.
Simple and Easy cover most Mass Media sites
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 1 - Simple | 34% |
| 2 - Easy | 42% |
| 3 - Moderate | 15% |
| 4 - Complex | 6% |
| 5 - Advanced | 3% |
Easy (42%) is the most common tier. Simple and Easy together account for 76% of sites, while 15% land at Moderate and 9% at Complex or Advanced.
robots.txt
Nearly all Mass Media sites publish a robots.txt file
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Publish a valid robots.txt | 92% |
92% of Mass Media sites have a valid robots.txt — among the highest coverage rates of any surveyed sector. Just 8% leave crawl policy entirely undefined.
Mass Media's robots.txt files show moderate engagement with named bot policy
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 | 13% |
| 1 | 22% |
| 2–4 | 14% |
| 5–9 | 12% |
| 10–15 | 5% |
| 16+ | 34% |
A mean of 18.7 named agents reflects moderate bot-policy investment in Mass Media. 13% of sites name no agents; 34% name 16 or more. The median of 5 suggests a bimodal split.
AI crawlers draw the most robots.txt attention in Mass Media
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| AI crawlers | 45% |
| SEO / search indexing | 28% |
| SEO audit tools | 33% |
| Commercial scrapers | 30% |
| Social / content scrapers | 14% |
| Archive / research crawlers | 12% |
| Monitoring / uptime bots | 1% |
AI crawlers are mentioned by 45% of Mass Media sites — the leading bot category. SEO audit tools follows at 33%. Figures are percentages of all 100 Mass Media sites including those with no robots.txt.
A blanket Disallow: / posture appears in 7% of Mass Media sites
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Uniform per-agent rules | 43% |
| Path-level mixed rules | 40% |
| Allow-only (no Disallow rules) | 1% |
| Mixed AI posture | 5% |
| Blanket Disallow: / | 7% |
Uniform per-agent rules is the dominant posture at 43% of all Mass Media sites. 7% issue a blanket Disallow: /. All figures are percentages of all 100 sites surveyed.
AI crawlers are among the most-targeted agents in Mass Media robots.txt
| Disallowed | Allowed (whitelisted) | |
|---|---|---|
| * | 84% | 37% |
| GPTBot | 38% | 4% |
| Google-Extended | 38% | 3% |
| PerplexityBot | 29% | 4% |
| CCBot | 30% | 1% |
| ChatGPT-User | 26% | 5% |
| ClaudeBot | 28% | 1% |
| anthropic-ai | 26% | 1% |
| Googlebot | 17% | 9% |
| OAI-SearchBot | 20% | 5% |
| PetalBot | 23% | 1% |
| Bytespider | 23% | 1% |
| omgili | 23% | 1% |
| cohere-ai | 22% | 1% |
| Scrapy | 20% | 1% |
| Applebot-Extended | 19% | 1% |
| Claude-Web | 19% | 1% |
| FacebookBot | 19% | 1% |
| Diffbot | 18% | 1% |
| omgilibot | 18% | 1% |
| Twitterbot | 10% | 8% |
| YouBot | 16% | 1% |
| Amazonbot | 15% | 1% |
| FriendlyCrawler | 15% | 1% |
| ImagesiftBot | 15% | 1% |
Values are percentages of all 100 Mass Media sites surveyed. The wildcard (*) leads at 84% Disallow. Among named agents, GPTBot, Google-Extended lead the Disallow list — reflecting direct targeting of AI training and indexing bots.
Industry Cohort
Mass Media leads the Media & Publishing cohort on JavaScript deployment
| WAF | Antibot | CAPTCHA | JavaScript | Rate Limit | TLS | robots.txt | Blocks AI | Tier | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Advertising & Marketing | 97% | 23% | 32% | 31% | 21% | 14% | 87% | 6% | Tier 1 |
| Mass Media | 98% | 12% | 21% | 49% | 16% | 8% | 92% | 43% | Tier 2 |
| Newspapers | 96% | 8% | 21% | 36% | 15% | 10% | 90% | 64% | Tier 2 |
| Public Relations | 95% | 10% | 14% | 25% | 14% | 14% | 76% | 6% | Tier 1 |
| Publishing | 95% | 16% | 24% | 45% | 21% | 11% | 92% | 49% | Tier 2 |
| Writing & Editing | 98% | 14% | 33% | 31% | 11% | 6% | 79% | 11% | Tier 1 |
Mass Media's 49% JavaScript adoption rate leads all sub-categories in Media & Publishing. WAF (98%) is also near the top. Tier difficulty (mean 1.67) is elevated.