Overview
JavaScript and Rate Limiting both elevate Veterinary's active barrier profile
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 100% |
| Antibot | 24% |
| CAPTCHA | 29% |
| JavaScript | 43% |
| Rate Limiting | 35% |
| TLS | 25% |
WAF leads at 100%. JavaScript (43%) and Rate Limiting (35%) together form a multi-layer active stack — more than most sectors deploy alongside WAF.
Barrier Landscape
WAF leads Veterinary at 100% — JavaScript is the main secondary layer
| Value | |
|---|---|
| WAF | 100% |
| Antibot | 24% |
| CAPTCHA | 29% |
| JavaScript | 43% |
| Rate Limiting | 35% |
| TLS | 25% |
| Has robots.txt | 89% |
| Blocks AI crawlers | 5% |
WAF dominates at 100%. JavaScript (43%) leads active secondary barriers, followed by Rate Limiting (35%). The remaining three barriers all sit at or below 29% — a concentrated rather than broadly stacked profile.
Two-barrier stacks are Veterinary's most common security posture
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 barriers | 0% |
| 1 barrier | 23% |
| 2 barriers | 36% |
| 3 barriers | 19% |
| 4 barriers | 6% |
| 5 barriers | 16% |
| 6 barriers | 0% |
36% of Veterinary sites carry exactly 2 barriers. 41% stack three or more. 0% carry none — a low share of unprotected sites for this sector.
Simple is the dominant access tier across Veterinary
| Mean recommended tier | |
|---|---|
| All sites | 1.54 |
A mean recommended tier of 1.54 and a median of Simple place Veterinary toward the easier end of the sectors surveyed. 57% of sites are Simple to access; 9% require Moderate or above.
Simple is the dominant tier in Veterinary, but Easy accounts for a significant share
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 1 - Simple | 57% |
| 2 - Easy | 34% |
| 3 - Moderate | 8% |
| 4 - Complex | 0% |
| 5 - Advanced | 1% |
Simple (57%) is the most common tier. Simple and Easy together account for 91% of sites, while 8% land at Moderate and 1% at Complex or Advanced.
robots.txt
Most Veterinary sites publish a robots.txt — coverage above the norm
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Publish a valid robots.txt | 89% |
89% of Veterinary sites publish a valid robots.txt. The 11% without a file leave crawl policy undefined — a lower gap than the cross-sector average of around 24%.
Veterinary sites name a handful of agents in robots.txt — few commit to comprehensive policies
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| 0 | 17% |
| 1 | 58% |
| 2–4 | 12% |
| 5–9 | 8% |
| 10–15 | 3% |
| 16+ | 2% |
The mean of 2.6 named agents reflects limited bot-policy investment in Veterinary. 17% of sites name no agents; 58% name exactly one. Only 2% maintain a list of 16 or more named bots.
SEO / search indexing and AI crawlers draw near-equal attention in Veterinary robots.txt
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| AI crawlers | 6% |
| SEO / search indexing | 9% |
| SEO audit tools | 4% |
| Commercial scrapers | 2% |
| Social / content scrapers | 2% |
| Archive / research crawlers | 5% |
| Monitoring / uptime bots | 0% |
SEO / search indexing appears in 9% of Veterinary sites; AI crawlers in 6%. 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 Veterinary robots.txt files
| % of sites | |
|---|---|
| Uniform per-agent rules | 52% |
| Path-level mixed rules | 29% |
| Allow-only (no Disallow rules) | 7% |
| Mixed AI posture | 1% |
| Blanket Disallow: / | 0% |
Uniform per-agent rules lead at 52%, with path-level mixed rules at 29%. Mixed AI posture (1%) and blanket Disallow (0%) are minimal.
AI crawlers are among the most-targeted agents in Veterinary robots.txt
| Disallowed | Allowed (whitelisted) | |
|---|---|---|
| * | 72% | 36% |
| facebookexternalhit | 3% | 3% |
| GPTBot | 5% | 1% |
| Googlebot-Image | 3% | 1% |
| ChatGPT-User | 2% | 2% |
| bingbot | 4% | — |
| ia_archiver | 4% | — |
| msnbot | 4% | — |
| msnbot-media | 4% | — |
| Googlebot | 1% | 3% |
| AhrefsBot | 3% | — |
| Nutch | 3% | — |
| CCBot | 3% | — |
| OAI-SearchBot | 1% | 2% |
| PerplexityBot | 2% | 1% |
| SemrushBot-SA | 2% | 1% |
| AhrefsSiteAudit | 2% | — |
| adsbot-google | 2% | — |
| ClaudeBot | 2% | — |
| SemrushBot-SI | 1% | 1% |
| Google-Extended | 2% | — |
| meta-externalagent | 2% | — |
| Baiduspider | 2% | — |
| Exabot | 1% | 1% |
| SemrushBot | 2% | — |
Values are percentages of all 100 Veterinary sites surveyed. The wildcard (*) leads at 72% Disallow. Among named agents, GPTBot lead the Disallow list — reflecting direct targeting of AI training and indexing bots.
Industry Cohort
Veterinary lags the Healthcare cohort on AI-blocking policy
| WAF | Antibot | CAPTCHA | JavaScript | Rate Limit | TLS | robots.txt | Blocks AI | Tier | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Healthcare | 93% | 17% | 21% | 35% | 27% | 21% | 78% | 14% | Tier 2 |
| Medical Devices & Equipment | 92% | 13% | 22% | 45% | 16% | 8% | 81% | 8% | Tier 1 |
| Mental Health | 95% | 16% | 24% | 40% | 18% | 6% | 85% | 12% | Tier 1 |
| Pharmaceuticals | 84% | 20% | 25% | 54% | 27% | 8% | 62% | 5% | Tier 1 |
| Veterinary | 100% | 24% | 29% | 43% | 35% | 25% | 89% | 5% | Tier 1 |
| Wellness | 98% | 23% | 31% | 48% | 34% | 16% | 83% | 22% | Tier 2 |
Veterinary's 5% AI-blocking rate is the lowest in the Healthcare cohort. WAF (100%) and JavaScript (43%) are at or above cohort peers on technical barriers.