Overview
JavaScript leads Oil & Gas's secondary barrier stack above the norm
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 86% |
| Antibot | 15% |
| CAPTCHA | 17% |
| JavaScript | 38% |
| Rate Limiting | 15% |
| TLS | 12% |
WAF at 86% is the dominant barrier. JavaScript (38%) leads secondary coverage. The remaining barriers sit materially lower, giving Oil & Gas a narrow but defined secondary layer.
Barrier Landscape
WAF leads Oil & Gas at 86% — JavaScript is the main secondary layer
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 86% |
| Antibot | 15% |
| CAPTCHA | 17% |
| JavaScript | 38% |
| Rate Limiting | 15% |
| TLS | 12% |
| Has robots.txt | 59% |
| Blocks AI crawlers | 4% |
WAF dominates at 86%. JavaScript (38%) leads active secondary barriers, followed by CAPTCHA (17%). The remaining three barriers all sit at or below 15% — a concentrated rather than broadly stacked profile.
Two-barrier stacks are Oil & Gas's most common security posture
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 barriers | 12% |
| 1 barrier | 31% |
| 2 barriers | 32% |
| 3 barriers | 19% |
| 4 barriers | 0% |
| 5 barriers | 5% |
| 6 barriers | 1% |
32% of Oil & Gas sites carry exactly 2 barriers. 25% stack three or more. 12% carry none — a moderate share of unprotected sites for this sector.
Simple is the dominant access tier across Oil & Gas
| Mean recommended tier | |
|---|---|
| All sites | 1.42 |
A mean recommended tier of 1.42 and a median of Simple place Oil & Gas toward the easier end of the sectors surveyed. 65% of sites are Simple to access; 5% require Moderate or above.
Simple is the dominant tier in Oil & Gas, but Easy accounts for a significant share
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 1 - Simple | 65% |
| 2 - Easy | 30% |
| 3 - Moderate | 4% |
| 4 - Complex | 0% |
| 5 - Advanced | 1% |
Simple (65%) is the most common tier. Simple and Easy together account for 95% of sites, while 4% land at Moderate and 1% at Complex or Advanced.
robots.txt
Nearly two-thirds of Oil & Gas sites publish any robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Publish a valid robots.txt | 59% |
Only 59% of Oil & Gas sites have a valid robots.txt. Nearly 41% leave crawl policy undefined — one of the lower coverage rates across surveyed sectors.
Most Oil & Gas sites name one bot or none in their robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 | 49% |
| 1 | 30% |
| 2–4 | 13% |
| 5–9 | 2% |
| 10–15 | 0% |
| 16+ | 6% |
49% of Oil & Gas sites name zero agents and 30% name one. A mean of 5.1 is pulled up by a small number of sites with extensive policies, while the median stays at 1.
SEO audit tools draw the most robots.txt attention in Oil & Gas
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| AI crawlers | 5% |
| SEO / search indexing | 4% |
| SEO audit tools | 7% |
| Commercial scrapers | 3% |
| Social / content scrapers | 2% |
| Archive / research crawlers | 2% |
| Monitoring / uptime bots | 0% |
SEO audit tools are named in 7% of Oil & Gas 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 Oil & Gas robots.txt files
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Uniform per-agent rules | 34% |
| Path-level mixed rules | 22% |
| Allow-only (no Disallow rules) | 3% |
| Mixed AI posture | 0% |
| Blanket Disallow: / | 0% |
Uniform per-agent rules lead at 34%, with path-level mixed rules at 22%. Mixed AI posture (0%) and blanket Disallow (0%) are minimal.
A cluster of six agents lead named Disallow rules in Oil & Gas robots.txt
| Disallowed | Allowed (whitelisted) | |
|---|---|---|
| * | 44% | 26% |
| GPTBot | 3% | 1% |
| BLEXBot | 3% | — |
| MSIECrawler | 3% | — |
| WebCopier | 3% | — |
| psbot | 3% | — |
| MJ12bot | 3% | — |
| AhrefsBot | 2% | 1% |
| rogerbot | 2% | — |
| Pinterestbot | 1% | 1% |
| SemrushBot | 2% | — |
| Applebot-Extended | 1% | 1% |
| Bytespider | 2% | — |
| ClaudeBot | 1% | 1% |
| Google-Extended | 1% | 1% |
| Meta-ExternalAgent | 1% | 1% |
| omgilibot | 2% | — |
| EmailCollector | 2% | — |
| Offline Explorer | 2% | — |
| ScoutJet | 2% | — |
| SiteSnagger | 2% | — |
| Teleport | 2% | — |
| TeleportPro | 2% | — |
| WebStripper | 2% | — |
| Xenu's Link Sleuth 1.1c | 2% | — |
Values are percentages of all 100 Oil & Gas sites surveyed. The wildcard (*) leads at 44% Disallow. Among named agents, GPTBot, BLEXBot, MSIECrawler, WebCopier, psbot, and MJ12bot all share the top position at 3% Disallow.
Industry Cohort
Oil & Gas is the most accessible sub-category in the Energy & Utilities cohort
| WAF | Antibot | CAPTCHA | JavaScript | Rate Limit | TLS | robots.txt | Blocks AI | Tier | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oil & Gas | 86% | 15% | 17% | 38% | 15% | 12% | 59% | 4% | Tier 1 |
| Public Utility | 83% | 19% | 13% | 37% | 17% | 10% | 53% | 3% | Tier 1 |
| Renewable Energy | 89% | 14% | 16% | 38% | 15% | 11% | 78% | 5% | Tier 1 |
A median tier of Simple and mean of 1.38 make Oil & Gas the easiest to access programmatically within Energy & Utilities. WAF (86%) and AI blocking (4%) are in line with cohort peers.