B
Evidence Grade B
Graded
accuracy verified by the review judge
Safe to Cite
Current
73%
73% -- share of sites with ai crawler access barriers for websites (2026)
73% of websites have at least one technical barrier blocking AI crawler access, with robots.txt misconfiguration being the largest category.
Attribution:
View source
Lighthouse Research Team
Last verified:
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Source verified
Evidence graded
Value
73%
Unit
Percentage
Data Vintage
2026
Entity
Evidence Quality
B
Strong, reliable evidence
Sourced from a well-regarded research firm or industry leader with transparent methodology and a reasonably large sample.
Single source - not yet corroborated
Score breakdown
Extraction
75
Source Trust
60
Citation Chain
20
Independence
30
Methodology
45
Freshness
95
Source
OtterlyAI
Primary
Tier B
https://betteraisearch.com/tactics/llms-txt-llm ↗
Source Article
llms.txt for AI Search: Does It Work?
Original Research
OtterlyAI
· Original study ↗
Methodology
OtterlyAI research; robots.txt misconfiguration largest category
Methodology documented
Segmentation
Industrymarketing
Cite this stat
Plain Text
websites: 73% share of sites with ai crawler access barriers. Source: OtterlyAI (2026). Via Lighthouse Intelligence -- https://lighthousedata.io/data/sites-technical-barrier-ai-crawlers
HTML Embed
<blockquote cite="https://lighthousedata.io/data/sites-technical-barrier-ai-crawlers" style="border-left:3px solid #2563eb;padding:12px 16px;margin:16px 0;font-family:system-ui,sans-serif;background:#f0f4ff;"><strong>73%</strong> -- share of sites with ai crawler access barriers for websites<br><small>Source: OtterlyAI (2026) · <a href="https://lighthousedata.io/data/sites-technical-barrier-ai-crawlers" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Lighthouse Intelligence</a></small></blockquote>
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