Overview
JavaScript leads Venture Capital's secondary barrier stack above the norm
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 92% |
| Antibot | 15% |
| CAPTCHA | 14% |
| JavaScript | 33% |
| Rate Limiting | 20% |
| TLS | 15% |
WAF at 92% is the dominant barrier. JavaScript (33%) leads secondary coverage. The remaining barriers sit materially lower, giving Venture Capital a narrow but defined secondary layer.
Barrier Landscape
WAF leads Venture Capital at 92% — JavaScript is the main secondary layer
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 92% |
| Antibot | 15% |
| CAPTCHA | 14% |
| JavaScript | 33% |
| Rate Limiting | 20% |
| TLS | 15% |
| Has robots.txt | 79% |
| Blocks AI crawlers | 2% |
WAF dominates at 92%. JavaScript (33%) leads active secondary barriers, followed by Rate Limiting (20%). The remaining three barriers all sit at or below 15% — a concentrated rather than broadly stacked profile.
Single-barrier configurations dominate Venture Capital — mostly WAF alone
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 barriers | 8% |
| 1 barrier | 41% |
| 2 barriers | 26% |
| 3 barriers | 12% |
| 4 barriers | 5% |
| 5 barriers | 8% |
| 6 barriers | 0% |
41% of Venture Capital sites carry exactly one barrier — almost always WAF. Two-barrier stacks add 26%. Just 25% of sites layer three or more defences.
Venture Capital sites are predominantly Simple to access
| Mean recommended tier | |
|---|---|
| All sites | 1.21 |
A mean recommended tier of 1.21 and a median of Simple place Venture Capital among the most accessible sectors surveyed. 83% of sites are Simple to access; 2% require Moderate or above.
Simple tier covers more than three-quarters of Venture Capital sites
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 1 - Simple | 83% |
| 2 - Easy | 15% |
| 3 - Moderate | 1% |
| 4 - Complex | 0% |
| 5 - Advanced | 1% |
Simple (83%) is the most common tier. Simple and Easy together account for 98% of sites, while 1% land at Moderate and 1% at Complex or Advanced.
robots.txt
Nearly four in five of Venture Capital sites publish a robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Publish a valid robots.txt | 79% |
79% of Venture Capital sites have a valid robots.txt. The remaining 21% leave crawl policy entirely undefined — a meaningful gap for a sector of this scale.
Most Venture Capital sites name one bot or none in their robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 | 42% |
| 1 | 46% |
| 2–4 | 6% |
| 5–9 | 1% |
| 10–15 | 2% |
| 16+ | 3% |
42% of Venture Capital sites name zero agents and 46% name one. A mean of 2.2 is pulled up by a small number of sites with extensive policies, while the median stays at 1.
SEO audit tools draw the most robots.txt attention in Venture Capital
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| AI crawlers | 2% |
| SEO / search indexing | 4% |
| SEO audit tools | 5% |
| Commercial scrapers | 2% |
| Social / content scrapers | 1% |
| Archive / research crawlers | 1% |
| Monitoring / uptime bots | 0% |
SEO audit tools are named in 5% of Venture Capital robots.txt files, followed by SEO / search indexing at 4%. All figures are percentages of all 100 sites including those with no robots.txt.
Uniform per-agent rules dominate Venture Capital robots.txt files
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Uniform per-agent rules | 37% |
| Path-level mixed rules | 32% |
| Allow-only (no Disallow rules) | 8% |
| Mixed AI posture | 1% |
| Blanket Disallow: / | 2% |
Uniform per-agent rules lead at 37%, with path-level mixed rules at 32%. Mixed AI posture (1%) and blanket Disallow (2%) are minimal.
PetalBot leads named Disallow rules in Venture Capital robots.txt
| Disallowed | Allowed (whitelisted) | |
|---|---|---|
| * | 48% | 38% |
| PetalBot | 4% | — |
| Googlebot | 2% | 2% |
| BLEXBot | 3% | — |
| MJ12bot | 3% | — |
| Barkrowler | 3% | — |
| magpie-crawler | 3% | — |
| YandexBot | 2% | 1% |
| Bingbot | 1% | 2% |
| CrazyWebCrawler-Spider | 1% | 1% |
| AhrefsBot | 2% | — |
| CazoodleBot | 2% | — |
| Gigabot | 2% | — |
| Go-http-client | 2% | — |
| Node/simplecrawler | 2% | — |
| Nuclei | 2% | — |
| Riddler | 2% | — |
| WikiDo | 2% | — |
| Zoominfobot | 2% | — |
| dotbot/1.0 | 2% | — |
| Bytespider | 1% | 1% |
| CCBot | 1% | 1% |
| YouBot | 1% | 1% |
| Baiduspider | 1% | 1% |
| DuckDuckBot | 1% | 1% |
Values are percentages of all 100 Venture Capital sites surveyed. The wildcard (*) leads at 48% Disallow. Among named agents, PetalBot, BLEXBot, MJ12bot are the most frequently targeted — focused on non-AI crawlers.
Industry Cohort
Venture Capital sits mid-table within the Financial Services cohort
| WAF | Antibot | CAPTCHA | JavaScript | Rate Limit | TLS | robots.txt | Blocks AI | Tier | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Accounting & Auditing | 93% | 15% | 13% | 40% | 8% | 10% | 63% | 1% | Tier 1 |
| Banking | 86% | 19% | 10% | 36% | 12% | 11% | 72% | 4% | Tier 2 |
| Finance | 88% | 27% | 15% | 36% | 22% | 16% | 82% | 13% | Tier 2 |
| Insurance | 86% | 26% | 19% | 37% | 17% | 13% | 71% | 3% | Tier 2 |
| Investment | 94% | 23% | 14% | 41% | 19% | 9% | 76% | 5% | Tier 1 |
| Venture Capital | 92% | 15% | 14% | 33% | 20% | 15% | 79% | 2% | Tier 1 |
Across Financial Services, Venture Capital's barrier rates are broadly in line with peers. WAF at 92%, JavaScript at 33%, and AI blocking at 2% all sit near the cohort median. Tier difficulty (mean 1.15) is below the group average.