Overview
JavaScript leads Public Safety's secondary barrier stack above the norm
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 94% |
| Antibot | 12% |
| CAPTCHA | 25% |
| JavaScript | 44% |
| Rate Limiting | 18% |
| TLS | 14% |
WAF at 94% is the dominant barrier. JavaScript (44%) leads secondary coverage. The remaining barriers sit materially lower, giving Public Safety a narrow but defined secondary layer.
Barrier Landscape
WAF leads Public Safety at 94% — JavaScript is the main secondary layer
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 94% |
| Antibot | 12% |
| CAPTCHA | 25% |
| JavaScript | 44% |
| Rate Limiting | 18% |
| TLS | 14% |
| Has robots.txt | 74% |
| Blocks AI crawlers | 6% |
WAF dominates at 94%. JavaScript (44%) leads active secondary barriers, followed by CAPTCHA (25%). The remaining three barriers all sit at or below 18% — a concentrated rather than broadly stacked profile.
Public Safety's barrier counts are spread — no single configuration dominates
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 barriers | 6% |
| 1 barrier | 31% |
| 2 barriers | 30% |
| 3 barriers | 21% |
| 4 barriers | 8% |
| 5 barriers | 3% |
| 6 barriers | 1% |
Barrier counts vary widely across Public Safety sites. Single-barrier configurations are the modal count at 31%, but the distribution is broad. 33% of sites carry three or more.
Public Safety sites are predominantly Simple to access
| Mean recommended tier | |
|---|---|
| All sites | 1.26 |
A mean recommended tier of 1.26 and a median of Simple place Public Safety among the most accessible sectors surveyed. 83% of sites are Simple to access; 5% require Moderate or above.
Simple tier covers more than three-quarters of Public Safety sites
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 1 - Simple | 83% |
| 2 - Easy | 12% |
| 3 - Moderate | 3% |
| 4 - Complex | 0% |
| 5 - Advanced | 2% |
Simple (83%) is the most common tier. Simple and Easy together account for 95% of sites, while 3% land at Moderate and 2% at Complex or Advanced.
robots.txt
Around three-quarters of Public Safety sites publish a robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Publish a valid robots.txt | 74% |
74% of Public Safety sites have a valid robots.txt. The remaining 26% leave crawl policy entirely undefined — a meaningful gap for a sector of this scale.
Most Public Safety sites name one bot or none in their robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 | 37% |
| 1 | 45% |
| 2–4 | 5% |
| 5–9 | 6% |
| 10–15 | 1% |
| 16+ | 6% |
37% of Public Safety sites name zero agents and 45% name one. A mean of 3.1 is pulled up by a small number of sites with extensive policies, while the median stays at 1.
SEO audit tools lead Public Safety's robots.txt mentions ahead of AI crawlers
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| AI crawlers | 6% |
| SEO / search indexing | 5% |
| SEO audit tools | 11% |
| Commercial scrapers | 3% |
| Social / content scrapers | 0% |
| Archive / research crawlers | 3% |
| Monitoring / uptime bots | 0% |
SEO audit tools are mentioned by 11% of Public Safety sites — the leading bot category, ahead of AI crawlers at 6%. Figures are percentages of all 100 sites surveyed.
Uniform per-agent rules dominate Public Safety robots.txt files
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Uniform per-agent rules | 44% |
| Path-level mixed rules | 27% |
| Allow-only (no Disallow rules) | 2% |
| Mixed AI posture | 0% |
| Blanket Disallow: / | 1% |
Uniform per-agent rules lead at 44%, with path-level mixed rules at 27%. Mixed AI posture (0%) and blanket Disallow (1%) are minimal.
AhrefsBot leads named Disallow rules in Public Safety robots.txt
| Disallowed | Allowed (whitelisted) | |
|---|---|---|
| * | 61% | 29% |
| AhrefsBot | 8% | — |
| AhrefsSiteAudit | 5% | — |
| Nutch | 5% | — |
| adsbot-google | 5% | — |
| GPTBot | 5% | — |
| Bytespider | 4% | — |
| anthropic-ai | 4% | — |
| BLEXBot | 4% | — |
| SEOkicks-Robot | 4% | — |
| CCBot | 3% | — |
| FacebookBot | 3% | — |
| MJ12bot | 3% | — |
| meta-externalagent | 2% | — |
| ChatGPT-User | 2% | — |
| Google-Extended | 2% | — |
| ImagesiftBot | 2% | — |
| 008 | 2% | — |
| QuerySeekerSpider | 2% | — |
| Vagabondo | 2% | — |
| WBSearchBot | 2% | — |
| proximic | 2% | — |
| SemrushBot | 2% | — |
| Baiduspider | 2% | — |
| Yandex | 2% | — |
Values are percentages of all 100 Public Safety sites surveyed. The wildcard (*) leads at 61% Disallow. Among named agents, AhrefsBot, AhrefsSiteAudit, Nutch are the most frequently targeted — focused on non-AI crawlers.
Industry Cohort
Public Safety lags the Public Sector cohort on AI-blocking policy
| WAF | Antibot | CAPTCHA | JavaScript | Rate Limit | TLS | robots.txt | Blocks AI | Tier | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Government | 80% | 10% | 8% | 33% | 15% | 12% | 64% | 10% | Tier 2 |
| Military | 77% | 11% | 16% | 21% | 19% | 17% | 62% | 7% | Tier 1 |
| Political Organizations | 97% | 13% | 23% | 47% | 16% | 9% | 79% | 6% | Tier 1 |
| Public Policy | 96% | 9% | 9% | 28% | 11% | 9% | 86% | 8% | Tier 1 |
| Public Safety | 94% | 12% | 25% | 44% | 18% | 14% | 74% | 6% | Tier 1 |
Public Safety's 6% AI-blocking rate is the lowest in the Public Sector cohort. WAF (94%) and JavaScript (44%) are in line with cohort peers on technical barriers.