Overview
JavaScript leads Telecom's secondary barrier stack above the norm
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 95% |
| Antibot | 19% |
| CAPTCHA | 18% |
| JavaScript | 45% |
| Rate Limiting | 16% |
| TLS | 11% |
WAF at 95% is the dominant barrier. JavaScript (45%) leads secondary coverage. The remaining barriers sit materially lower, giving Telecom a narrow but defined secondary layer.
Barrier Landscape
WAF leads Telecom at 95% — JavaScript is the main secondary layer
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 95% |
| Antibot | 19% |
| CAPTCHA | 18% |
| JavaScript | 45% |
| Rate Limiting | 16% |
| TLS | 11% |
| Has robots.txt | 79% |
| Blocks AI crawlers | 6% |
WAF dominates at 95%. JavaScript (45%) leads active secondary barriers, followed by Antibot (19%). The remaining three barriers all sit at or below 18% — a concentrated rather than broadly stacked profile.
Two-barrier stacks are Telecom's most common security posture
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 barriers | 4% |
| 1 barrier | 33% |
| 2 barriers | 38% |
| 3 barriers | 13% |
| 4 barriers | 5% |
| 5 barriers | 6% |
| 6 barriers | 1% |
38% of Telecom sites carry exactly 2 barriers. 25% stack three or more. 4% carry none — a low share of unprotected sites for this sector.
Telecom is predominantly Easy to access — with a notable Moderate minority
| Mean recommended tier | |
|---|---|
| All sites | 1.70 |
A mean recommended tier of 1.70 and a median of Easy place Telecom around the middle of the sectors surveyed. 46% of sites are Simple to access; 11% require Moderate or above.
Simple and Easy cover nine in ten Telecom sites
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 1 - Simple | 45.5% |
| 2 - Easy | 43.4% |
| 3 - Moderate | 8.1% |
| 4 - Complex | 2% |
| 5 - Advanced | 1% |
Simple (46%) is the most common tier. Simple and Easy together account for 89% of sites, while 8% land at Moderate and 3% at Complex or Advanced.
robots.txt
Nearly four in five of Telecom sites publish a robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Publish a valid robots.txt | 79% |
79% of Telecom sites have a valid robots.txt. The remaining 21% leave crawl policy entirely undefined — a meaningful gap for a sector of this scale.
Telecom sites name a handful of agents in robots.txt — few commit to comprehensive policies
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 | 27% |
| 1 | 41% |
| 2–4 | 15% |
| 5–9 | 6% |
| 10–15 | 6% |
| 16+ | 5% |
The mean of 4.4 named agents reflects limited bot-policy investment in Telecom. 27% of sites name no agents; 41% name exactly one. Only 5% maintain a list of 16 or more named bots.
SEO crawlers draw the most robots.txt attention in Telecom
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| AI crawlers | 12% |
| SEO / search indexing | 19% |
| SEO audit tools | 4% |
| Commercial scrapers | 1% |
| Social / content scrapers | 1% |
| Archive / research crawlers | 8% |
| Monitoring / uptime bots | 0% |
SEO / search indexing bots are mentioned by 19% of Telecom sites. AI crawlers follow at 12%. All figures are percentages of all 100 Telecom sites surveyed.
Path-level mixed rules dominate Telecom robots.txt posture
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Uniform per-agent rules | 36% |
| Path-level mixed rules | 39% |
| Allow-only (no Disallow rules) | 2% |
| Mixed AI posture | 4% |
| Blanket Disallow: / | 2% |
Path-level mixed rules lead at 39%, with uniform per-agent rules at 36%. Mixed AI posture reaches 4%.
Yandex leads named Disallow rules in Telecom robots.txt
| Disallowed | Allowed (whitelisted) | |
|---|---|---|
| * | 69% | 40% |
| GPTBot | 5% | 8% |
| Googlebot | 6% | 6% |
| Yandex | 7% | 4% |
| ChatGPT-User | 4% | 6% |
| OAI-SearchBot | 4% | 6% |
| PerplexityBot | 3% | 6% |
| Google-Extended | 3% | 5% |
| AdsBot-Google | 3% | 4% |
| Baiduspider | 7% | — |
| ia_archiver | 5% | — |
| ClaudeBot | 2% | 3% |
| Bingbot | 2% | 3% |
| Googlebot-Image | 2% | 2% |
| Googlebot-News | 2% | 2% |
| anthropic-ai | 2% | 1% |
| facebookexternalhit | 2% | 1% |
| HTTrack | 3% | — |
| Googlebot-image | 1% | 2% |
| Slurp | 2% | 1% |
| MSIECrawler | 3% | — |
| SiteSnagger | 3% | — |
| WebCopier | 3% | — |
| WebStripper | 3% | — |
| larbin | 3% | — |
Values are percentages of all 100 Telecom sites surveyed. The wildcard (*) leads at 69% Disallow. Among named agents, Yandex, Baiduspider, Googlebot are the most frequently targeted — focused on non-AI crawlers.