Overview
JavaScript and Rate Limiting both elevate Pharmaceuticals's active barrier profile
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 84% |
| Antibot | 20% |
| CAPTCHA | 25% |
| JavaScript | 54% |
| Rate Limiting | 27% |
| TLS | 8% |
WAF leads at 84%. JavaScript (54%) and Rate Limiting (27%) together form a multi-layer active stack — more than most sectors deploy alongside WAF.
Barrier Landscape
JavaScript is Pharmaceuticals's dominant secondary barrier by a wide margin
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 84% |
| Antibot | 20% |
| CAPTCHA | 25% |
| JavaScript | 54% |
| Rate Limiting | 27% |
| TLS | 8% |
| Has robots.txt | 62% |
| Blocks AI crawlers | 5% |
WAF at 84% and JavaScript at 54% together form the sector's main defensive layer. Rate Limiting (27%) follows at a distance. The barrier profile is concentrated rather than broadly spread.
Two-barrier stacks are Pharmaceuticals's most common security posture
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 barriers | 14% |
| 1 barrier | 21% |
| 2 barriers | 31% |
| 3 barriers | 19% |
| 4 barriers | 2% |
| 5 barriers | 8% |
| 6 barriers | 5% |
31% of Pharmaceuticals sites carry exactly 2 barriers. 34% stack three or more. 14% carry none — a moderate share of unprotected sites for this sector.
Simple is the dominant scraping tier across Pharmaceuticals sites
| Mean recommended tier | |
|---|---|
| All sites | 1.48 |
A mean recommended tier of 1.48 and a median of Simple place Pharmaceuticals toward the easier end of the sectors surveyed. 60% of sites are Simple to access; 6% require Moderate or above.
Simple is the dominant tier in Pharmaceuticals, but Easy accounts for a significant share
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 1 - Simple | 60.2% |
| 2 - Easy | 33.7% |
| 3 - Moderate | 5.1% |
| 4 - Complex | 0% |
| 5 - Advanced | 1% |
Simple (60%) is the most common tier. Simple and Easy together account for 94% of sites, while 5% land at Moderate and 1% at Complex or Advanced.
robots.txt
Nearly two-thirds of Pharmaceuticals sites publish any robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Publish a valid robots.txt | 62% |
Only 62% of Pharmaceuticals sites have a valid robots.txt. Nearly 38% leave crawl policy undefined — one of the lower coverage rates across surveyed sectors.
Most Pharmaceuticals sites name one bot or none in their robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 | 42% |
| 1 | 29% |
| 2–4 | 16% |
| 5–9 | 8% |
| 10–15 | 3% |
| 16+ | 2% |
42% of Pharmaceuticals sites name zero agents and 29% name one. A mean of 2.2 is pulled up by a small number of sites with extensive policies, while the median stays at 1.
SEO / search indexing draw the most robots.txt attention in Pharmaceuticals
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| AI crawlers | 5% |
| SEO / search indexing | 8% |
| SEO audit tools | 3% |
| Commercial scrapers | 1% |
| Social / content scrapers | 0% |
| Archive / research crawlers | 2% |
| Monitoring / uptime bots | 0% |
SEO / search indexing are named in 8% of Pharmaceuticals 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 Pharmaceuticals robots.txt files
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Uniform per-agent rules | 31% |
| Path-level mixed rules | 29% |
| Allow-only (no Disallow rules) | 1% |
| Mixed AI posture | 0% |
| Blanket Disallow: / | 1% |
Uniform per-agent rules lead at 31%, with path-level mixed rules at 29%. Mixed AI posture (0%) and blanket Disallow (1%) are minimal.
AI crawlers are among the most-targeted agents in Pharmaceuticals robots.txt
| Disallowed | Allowed (whitelisted) | |
|---|---|---|
| * | 53% | 30% |
| Yandex | 7% | 5% |
| Googlebot | 4% | 5% |
| Mediapartners-Google | 1% | 8% |
| Googlebot-Image | 2% | 4% |
| GPTBot | 5% | — |
| bingbot | 4% | 1% |
| Amazonbot | 5% | — |
| Bytespider | 4% | — |
| CCBot | 4% | — |
| ClaudeBot | 4% | — |
| AdsBot-Google | 1% | 2% |
| Googlebot-Mobile | 1% | 2% |
| AhrefsBot | 3% | — |
| anthropic-ai | 3% | — |
| meta-externalagent | 3% | — |
| Googlebot-News | 1% | 1% |
| MSNBOT_Mobile | 1% | 1% |
| Mediapartners | 1% | 1% |
| YahooSeeker/M1A1-R2D2 | 1% | 1% |
| online-webceo-bot | 1% | 1% |
| MLBot | 2% | — |
| PiplBot | 2% | — |
| neticle.hu | 2% | — |
| petalbot | 2% | — |
Values are percentages of all 100 Pharmaceuticals sites surveyed. The wildcard (*) leads at 53% Disallow. Among named agents, Yandex leads the Disallow list at 7%, ahead of GPTBot and Amazonbot at 5% each.
Industry Cohort
Pharmaceuticals leads the Healthcare cohort on JavaScript deployment
| WAF | Antibot | CAPTCHA | JavaScript | Rate Limit | TLS | robots.txt | Blocks AI | Tier | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Healthcare | 93% | 17% | 21% | 35% | 27% | 21% | 78% | 14% | Tier 2 |
| Medical Devices & Equipment | 92% | 13% | 22% | 45% | 16% | 8% | 81% | 8% | Tier 1 |
| Mental Health | 95% | 16% | 24% | 40% | 18% | 6% | 85% | 12% | Tier 1 |
| Pharmaceuticals | 84% | 20% | 25% | 54% | 27% | 8% | 62% | 5% | Tier 1 |
| Veterinary | 100% | 24% | 29% | 43% | 35% | 25% | 89% | 5% | Tier 1 |
| Wellness | 98% | 23% | 31% | 48% | 34% | 16% | 83% | 22% | Tier 2 |
Pharmaceuticals's 54% JavaScript adoption rate leads all sub-categories in Healthcare. WAF (84%) is mid-table. Tier difficulty (mean 1.48) is in line with cohort peers.