Overview
Public Relations sites run almost entirely on WAF — secondary barriers are thin
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 95% |
| Antibot | 10% |
| CAPTCHA | 14% |
| JavaScript | 25% |
| Rate Limiting | 14% |
| TLS | 14% |
WAF at 95% dominates. No secondary barrier exceeds 25%, leaving Public Relations with one of the narrowest active-barrier profiles across all surveyed sectors.
Barrier Landscape
WAF leads Public Relations at 95% — JavaScript is the main secondary layer
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 95% |
| Antibot | 10% |
| CAPTCHA | 14% |
| JavaScript | 25% |
| Rate Limiting | 14% |
| TLS | 14% |
| Has robots.txt | 76% |
| Blocks AI crawlers | 6% |
WAF dominates at 95%. JavaScript (25%) leads active secondary barriers, followed by Rate Limiting (14%). The remaining three barriers all sit at or below 14% — a concentrated rather than broadly stacked profile.
Single-barrier configurations dominate Public Relations — mostly WAF alone
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 barriers | 3% |
| 1 barrier | 56% |
| 2 barriers | 20% |
| 3 barriers | 10% |
| 4 barriers | 9% |
| 5 barriers | 2% |
| 6 barriers | 0% |
56% of Public Relations sites carry exactly one barrier — almost always WAF. Two-barrier stacks add 20%. Just 21% of sites layer three or more defences.
Nearly all Public Relations sites are Simple to access programmatically
| Mean recommended tier | |
|---|---|
| All sites | 1.07 |
A mean recommended tier of 1.07 and a median of Simple place Public Relations among the most accessible sectors surveyed. 94% of sites are Simple to access; 1% require Moderate or above.
Simple tier covers more than three-quarters of Public Relations sites
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 1 - Simple | 94% |
| 2 - Easy | 5% |
| 3 - Moderate | 1% |
| 4 - Complex | 0% |
| 5 - Advanced | 0% |
Simple (94%) is the most common tier. Simple and Easy together account for 99% of sites, while 1% land at Moderate and 0% at Complex or Advanced.
robots.txt
Around three-quarters of Public Relations sites publish a robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Publish a valid robots.txt | 76% |
76% of Public Relations sites have a valid robots.txt. The remaining 24% leave crawl policy entirely undefined — a meaningful gap for a sector of this scale.
Most Public Relations sites name one bot or none in their robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 | 36% |
| 1 | 43% |
| 2–4 | 14% |
| 5–9 | 3% |
| 10–15 | 0% |
| 16+ | 4% |
36% of Public Relations sites name zero agents and 43% name one. A mean of 3.0 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 Public Relations
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| AI crawlers | 10% |
| SEO / search indexing | 4% |
| SEO audit tools | 5% |
| Commercial scrapers | 0% |
| Social / content scrapers | 0% |
| Archive / research crawlers | 2% |
| Monitoring / uptime bots | 0% |
AI crawlers are named in 10% of Public Relations robots.txt files, followed by SEO audit tools at 5%. All figures are percentages of all 100 sites including those with no robots.txt.
Uniform per-agent rules dominate Public Relations robots.txt files
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Uniform per-agent rules | 43% |
| Path-level mixed rules | 29% |
| Allow-only (no Disallow rules) | 4% |
| Mixed AI posture | 1% |
| Blanket Disallow: / | 0% |
Uniform per-agent rules lead at 43%, with path-level mixed rules at 29%. Mixed AI posture (1%) and blanket Disallow (0%) are minimal.
Yandex and GPTBot lead named Disallow rules in Public Relations robots.txt
| Disallowed | Allowed (whitelisted) | |
|---|---|---|
| * | 59% | 33% |
| Yandex | 5% | 2% |
| GPTBot | 5% | 2% |
| AhrefsBot | 4% | — |
| GoogleBot | 2% | 2% |
| Google-Extended | 2% | 2% |
| PetalBot | 3% | — |
| Bytespider | 2% | 1% |
| BLEXBot | 2% | — |
| Exabot | 2% | — |
| SemrushBot | 2% | — |
| TurnitinBot | 2% | — |
| dotbot | 2% | — |
| ia_archiver | 2% | — |
| ChatGPT-User | 1% | 1% |
| MJ12bot | 2% | — |
| AI2Bot | 1% | 1% |
| AdsBot-Google | 1% | 1% |
| AdsBot-Google-Mobile | 1% | 1% |
| AdsBot-Google-Mobile-Apps | 1% | 1% |
| Ai2Bot-Dolma | 1% | 1% |
| Amazonbot | 1% | 1% |
| Applebot-Extended | 1% | 1% |
| CCBot | 1% | 1% |
| ClaudeBot | 1% | 1% |
Values are percentages of all 100 Public Relations sites surveyed. The wildcard (*) leads at 59% Disallow. Among named agents, Yandex and GPTBot tie at the top of the Disallow list, each named by 5% of sites.
Industry Cohort
Public Relations lags the Media & Publishing cohort on AI-blocking policy
| 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 |
Public Relations's 6% AI-blocking rate is the lowest in the Media & Publishing cohort. WAF (95%) and JavaScript (25%) are in line with cohort peers on technical barriers.