Overview
JavaScript leads Outsourcing's secondary barrier stack above the norm
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 96% |
| Antibot | 11% |
| CAPTCHA | 18% |
| JavaScript | 28% |
| Rate Limiting | 15% |
| TLS | 12% |
WAF at 96% is the dominant barrier. JavaScript (28%) leads secondary coverage. The remaining barriers sit materially lower, giving Outsourcing a narrow but defined secondary layer.
Barrier Landscape
WAF leads Outsourcing at 96% — JavaScript is the main secondary layer
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 96% |
| Antibot | 11% |
| CAPTCHA | 18% |
| JavaScript | 28% |
| Rate Limiting | 15% |
| TLS | 12% |
| Has robots.txt | 79% |
| Blocks AI crawlers | 2% |
WAF dominates at 96%. JavaScript (28%) leads active secondary barriers, followed by CAPTCHA (18%). The remaining three barriers all sit at or below 15% — a concentrated rather than broadly stacked profile.
Single-barrier configurations dominate Outsourcing — mostly WAF alone
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 barriers | 3% |
| 1 barrier | 49% |
| 2 barriers | 28% |
| 3 barriers | 10% |
| 4 barriers | 5% |
| 5 barriers | 5% |
| 6 barriers | 0% |
49% of Outsourcing sites carry exactly one barrier — almost always WAF. Two-barrier stacks add 28%. Just 20% of sites layer three or more defences.
Outsourcing sites are predominantly Simple to access
| Mean recommended tier | |
|---|---|
| All sites | 1.19 |
A mean recommended tier of 1.19 and a median of Simple place Outsourcing among the most accessible sectors surveyed. 89% of sites are Simple to access; 6% require Moderate or above.
Simple tier covers more than three-quarters of Outsourcing sites
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 1 - Simple | 89% |
| 2 - Easy | 5% |
| 3 - Moderate | 4% |
| 4 - Complex | 2% |
| 5 - Advanced | 0% |
Simple (89%) is the most common tier. Simple and Easy together account for 94% of sites, while 4% land at Moderate and 2% at Complex or Advanced.
robots.txt
Nearly four in five of Outsourcing sites publish a robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Publish a valid robots.txt | 79% |
79% of Outsourcing sites have a valid robots.txt. The remaining 21% leave crawl policy entirely undefined — a meaningful gap for a sector of this scale.
Most Outsourcing sites name one bot or none in their robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 | 39% |
| 1 | 51% |
| 2–4 | 7% |
| 5–9 | 3% |
| 10–15 | 0% |
| 16+ | 0% |
39% of Outsourcing sites name zero agents and 51% name one. A mean of 0.9 is pulled up by a small number of sites with extensive policies, while the median stays at 1.
AI crawlers draw the most robots.txt attention in Outsourcing
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| AI crawlers | 5% |
| SEO / search indexing | 1% |
| SEO audit tools | 2% |
| Commercial scrapers | 0% |
| Social / content scrapers | 0% |
| Archive / research crawlers | 0% |
| Monitoring / uptime bots | 0% |
AI crawlers are named in 5% of Outsourcing robots.txt files, followed by SEO audit tools at 2%. All figures are percentages of all 100 sites including those with no robots.txt.
Uniform per-agent rules dominate Outsourcing robots.txt files
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Uniform per-agent rules | 47% |
| Path-level mixed rules | 25% |
| Allow-only (no Disallow rules) | 7% |
| Mixed AI posture | 1% |
| Blanket Disallow: / | 0% |
Uniform per-agent rules lead at 47%, with path-level mixed rules at 25%. Mixed AI posture (1%) and blanket Disallow (0%) are minimal.
SemrushBot leads named Disallow rules in Outsourcing robots.txt
| Disallowed | Allowed (whitelisted) | |
|---|---|---|
| * | 51% | 31% |
| GPTBot | 0% | 3% |
| PerplexityBot | 0% | 3% |
| ChatGPT-User | 0% | 3% |
| CCBot | 1% | 1% |
| SemrushBot | 2% | — |
| ClaudeBot | 0% | 2% |
| Google-Extended | 0% | 2% |
| SEMrushBot | 1% | — |
| SemrushBot-SA | 1% | — |
| AhrefsBot | 1% | — |
| DotBot | 1% | — |
| MJ12bot | 1% | — |
| MauiBot | 1% | — |
| facebookcatalog | 1% | — |
| facebookexternalhit | 1% | — |
| meta-externalagent | 1% | — |
| rogerbot | 1% | — |
| Baiduspider | 1% | — |
| Yandex | 1% | — |
| Googlebot-Image | 1% | — |
| OAI-Searchbot | 0% | 1% |
| Claude-Web | 0% | 1% |
Values are percentages of all 100 Outsourcing sites surveyed. The wildcard (*) leads at 51% Disallow. Among named agents, SemrushBot, CCBot, SEMrushBot are the most frequently targeted — focused on non-AI crawlers.
Industry Cohort
Outsourcing lags the Recruitment & HR cohort on AI-blocking policy
| WAF | Antibot | CAPTCHA | JavaScript | Rate Limit | TLS | robots.txt | Blocks AI | Tier | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Human Resources | 93% | 24% | 25% | 38% | 20% | 14% | 70% | 2% | Tier 1 |
| Outsourcing | 96% | 11% | 18% | 28% | 15% | 12% | 79% | 2% | Tier 1 |
| Recruitment & Staffing | 88% | 21% | 18% | 39% | 18% | 18% | 76% | 15% | Tier 1 |
Outsourcing's 2% AI-blocking rate is the lowest in the Recruitment & HR cohort. WAF (96%) and JavaScript (28%) are at or above cohort peers on technical barriers.