Overview
JavaScript leads Recruitment & Staffing's secondary barrier stack above the norm
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 88% |
| Antibot | 21% |
| CAPTCHA | 18% |
| JavaScript | 39% |
| Rate Limiting | 18% |
| TLS | 18% |
WAF at 88% is the dominant barrier. JavaScript (39%) leads secondary coverage. The remaining barriers sit materially lower, giving Recruitment & Staffing a narrow but defined secondary layer.
Barrier Landscape
WAF leads Recruitment & Staffing at 88% — JavaScript is the main secondary layer
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 88% |
| Antibot | 21% |
| CAPTCHA | 18% |
| JavaScript | 39% |
| Rate Limiting | 18% |
| TLS | 18% |
| Has robots.txt | 76% |
| Blocks AI crawlers | 15% |
WAF dominates at 88%. JavaScript (39%) leads active secondary barriers, followed by Antibot (21%). The remaining three barriers all sit at or below 18% — a concentrated rather than broadly stacked profile.
Single-barrier configurations dominate Recruitment & Staffing — mostly WAF alone
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 barriers | 6% |
| 1 barrier | 42% |
| 2 barriers | 23% |
| 3 barriers | 13% |
| 4 barriers | 6% |
| 5 barriers | 9% |
| 6 barriers | 1% |
42% of Recruitment & Staffing sites carry exactly one barrier — almost always WAF. Two-barrier stacks add 23%. Just 29% of sites layer three or more defences.
Simple is the dominant access tier across Recruitment & Staffing — with a meaningful Easy share
| Mean recommended tier | |
|---|---|
| All sites | 1.60 |
A mean recommended tier of 1.60 and a median of Simple place Recruitment & Staffing around the middle of the sectors surveyed. 54% of sites are Simple to access; 12% require Moderate or above.
Simple is the dominant tier in Recruitment & Staffing, but Easy accounts for a significant share
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 1 - Simple | 53.5% |
| 2 - Easy | 34.3% |
| 3 - Moderate | 10.1% |
| 4 - Complex | 2% |
| 5 - Advanced | 0% |
Simple (54%) is the most common tier. Simple and Easy together account for 88% of sites, while 10% land at Moderate and 2% at Complex or Advanced.
robots.txt
Around three-quarters of Recruitment & Staffing sites publish a robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Publish a valid robots.txt | 76% |
76% of Recruitment & Staffing sites have a valid robots.txt. The remaining 24% leave crawl policy entirely undefined — a meaningful gap for a sector of this scale.
Recruitment & Staffing sites name a handful of agents in robots.txt — few commit to comprehensive policies
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 | 35% |
| 1 | 38% |
| 2–4 | 14% |
| 5–9 | 3% |
| 10–15 | 4% |
| 16+ | 6% |
The mean of 8.0 named agents reflects limited bot-policy investment in Recruitment & Staffing. 35% of sites name no agents; 38% name exactly one. Only 6% maintain a list of 16 or more named bots.
SEO crawlers draw the most robots.txt attention in Recruitment & Staffing
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| AI crawlers | 16% |
| SEO / search indexing | 17% |
| SEO audit tools | 8% |
| Commercial scrapers | 7% |
| Social / content scrapers | 7% |
| Archive / research crawlers | 5% |
| Monitoring / uptime bots | 0% |
SEO / search indexing bots are mentioned by 17% of Recruitment & Staffing sites. AI crawlers follow at 16%. All figures are percentages of all 100 Recruitment & Staffing sites surveyed.
Uniform per-agent rules dominate Recruitment & Staffing robots.txt files
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Uniform per-agent rules | 46% |
| Path-level mixed rules | 23% |
| Allow-only (no Disallow rules) | 4% |
| Mixed AI posture | 2% |
| Blanket Disallow: / | 3% |
Uniform per-agent rules lead at 46%, with path-level mixed rules at 23%. Mixed AI posture (2%) and blanket Disallow (3%) are minimal.
AI crawlers are among the most-targeted agents in Recruitment & Staffing robots.txt
| Disallowed | Allowed (whitelisted) | |
|---|---|---|
| * | 54% | 27% |
| GPTBot | 10% | 3% |
| Googlebot | 8% | 2% |
| Baiduspider | 6% | 2% |
| Bytespider | 7% | — |
| CCBot | 7% | — |
| anthropic-ai | 5% | 2% |
| Google-Extended | 4% | 2% |
| ia_archiver | 4% | 2% |
| Bingbot | 3% | 3% |
| Diffbot | 5% | — |
| Amazonbot | 3% | 2% |
| Applebot-Extended | 3% | 2% |
| Claude-Web | 3% | 2% |
| Yandex | 4% | — |
| Cohere | 2% | 2% |
| Google-CloudVertexBot | 2% | 2% |
| GoogleOther | 2% | 2% |
| Perplexity | 2% | 2% |
| cohere-ai | 2% | 2% |
| ClaudeBot | 4% | — |
| AhrefsBot | 4% | — |
| Mediapartners-Google | 1% | 3% |
| Twitterbot | 2% | 2% |
| LinkedInBot | 0% | 4% |
Values are percentages of all 100 Recruitment & Staffing sites surveyed. The wildcard (*) leads at 54% Disallow. Among named agents, GPTBot, Bytespider lead the Disallow list — reflecting direct targeting of AI training and indexing bots.
Industry Cohort
Recruitment & Staffing leads 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 |
Recruitment & Staffing's 15% AI-blocking rate in robots.txt is the highest in the Recruitment & HR cohort. WAF (88%) and JavaScript (39%) sit mid-table in the cohort on technical barriers.