Overview
JavaScript leads Science's secondary barrier stack above the norm
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 90% |
| Antibot | 15% |
| CAPTCHA | 11% |
| JavaScript | 35% |
| Rate Limiting | 15% |
| TLS | 9% |
WAF at 90% is the dominant barrier. JavaScript (35%) leads secondary coverage. The remaining barriers sit materially lower, giving Science a narrow but defined secondary layer.
Barrier Landscape
WAF leads Science at 90% — JavaScript is the main secondary layer
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 90% |
| Antibot | 15% |
| CAPTCHA | 11% |
| JavaScript | 35% |
| Rate Limiting | 15% |
| TLS | 9% |
| Has robots.txt | 79% |
| Blocks AI crawlers | 10% |
WAF dominates at 90%. JavaScript (35%) leads active secondary barriers, followed by Rate Limiting (15%). The remaining three barriers all sit at or below 15% — a concentrated rather than broadly stacked profile.
Single-barrier configurations dominate Science — mostly WAF alone
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 barriers | 8% |
| 1 barrier | 46% |
| 2 barriers | 28% |
| 3 barriers | 6% |
| 4 barriers | 5% |
| 5 barriers | 7% |
| 6 barriers | 0% |
46% of Science sites carry exactly one barrier — almost always WAF. Two-barrier stacks add 28%. Just 18% of sites layer three or more defences.
Science is predominantly Easy to access — with a notable Moderate minority
| Mean recommended tier | |
|---|---|
| All sites | 1.80 |
A mean recommended tier of 1.80 and a median of Easy place Science around the middle of the sectors surveyed. 34% of sites are Simple to access; 10% require Moderate or above.
Easy is the most common access tier across Science sites
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 1 - Simple | 34% |
| 2 - Easy | 55.7% |
| 3 - Moderate | 7.2% |
| 4 - Complex | 2.1% |
| 5 - Advanced | 1% |
Easy (56%) is the most common tier. Simple and Easy together account for 90% of sites, while 7% land at Moderate and 3% at Complex or Advanced.
robots.txt
Nearly four in five of Science sites publish a robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Publish a valid robots.txt | 79% |
79% of Science sites have a valid robots.txt. The remaining 21% leave crawl policy entirely undefined — a meaningful gap for a sector of this scale.
Science sites name a handful of agents in robots.txt — few commit to comprehensive policies
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 | 32% |
| 1 | 40% |
| 2–4 | 13% |
| 5–9 | 10% |
| 10–15 | 2% |
| 16+ | 3% |
The mean of 2.9 named agents reflects limited bot-policy investment in Science. 32% of sites name no agents; 40% name exactly one. Only 3% maintain a list of 16 or more named bots.
SEO audit tools and AI crawlers draw near-equal attention in Science robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| AI crawlers | 10% |
| SEO / search indexing | 6% |
| SEO audit tools | 11% |
| Commercial scrapers | 3% |
| Social / content scrapers | 4% |
| Archive / research crawlers | 1% |
| Monitoring / uptime bots | 0% |
SEO audit tools appears in 11% of Science sites; AI crawlers in 10%. The near-equal split reflects a sector that treats both categories with comparable priority. Figures are percentages of all 100 sites.
Uniform per-agent rules dominate Science robots.txt files
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Uniform per-agent rules | 41% |
| Path-level mixed rules | 34% |
| Allow-only (no Disallow rules) | 3% |
| Mixed AI posture | 0% |
| Blanket Disallow: / | 1% |
Uniform per-agent rules lead at 41%, with path-level mixed rules at 34%. Mixed AI posture (0%) and blanket Disallow (1%) are minimal.
AI crawlers are among the most-targeted agents in Science robots.txt
| Disallowed | Allowed (whitelisted) | |
|---|---|---|
| * | 59% | 39% |
| GPTBot | 8% | — |
| Googlebot | 4% | 4% |
| Bytespider | 7% | — |
| Google-Extended | 7% | — |
| SemrushBot | 6% | — |
| Twitterbot | 2% | 4% |
| AhrefsBot | 5% | — |
| Applebot-Extended | 5% | — |
| ClaudeBot | 5% | — |
| bingbot | 2% | 3% |
| facebookexternalhit | 2% | 3% |
| Amazonbot | 5% | — |
| CCBot | 5% | — |
| Yahoo! Slurp | 2% | 2% |
| AdsBot-Google | 2% | 2% |
| PetalBot | 4% | — |
| DataForSeoBot | 3% | — |
| FacebookBot | 3% | — |
| Scrapy | 3% | — |
| cohere-ai | 3% | — |
| Yandex | 2% | 1% |
| ChatGPT-User | 3% | — |
| MJ12bot | 3% | — |
| dotbot | 3% | — |
Values are percentages of all 100 Science sites surveyed. The wildcard (*) leads at 59% Disallow. Among named agents, GPTBot, Bytespider lead the Disallow list — reflecting direct targeting of AI training and indexing bots.
Industry Cohort
Science is among the hardest sub-categories to access in Education
| WAF | Antibot | CAPTCHA | JavaScript | Rate Limit | TLS | robots.txt | Blocks AI | Tier | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Distance Learning | 97% | 27% | 37% | 43% | 26% | 16% | 85% | 25% | Tier 2 |
| Education | 98% | 17% | 18% | 37% | 18% | 10% | 81% | 15% | Tier 2 |
| Foreign Language | 96% | 15% | 20% | 42% | 14% | 13% | 82% | 6% | Tier 1 |
| Libraries | 92% | 16% | 9% | 36% | 16% | 11% | 69% | 8% | Tier 1 |
| Reference | 81% | 15% | 17% | 31% | 16% | 3% | 60% | 17% | Tier 1 |
| Science | 90% | 15% | 11% | 35% | 15% | 9% | 79% | 10% | Tier 2 |
| Training & Certification | 93% | 15% | 19% | 41% | 17% | 11% | 75% | 7% | Tier 1 |
A median tier of Easy and mean of 1.66 make Science one of the harder sectors within Education to access programmatically. JavaScript (35%) is elevated in the cohort.