B
Evidence Grade B
Graded
accuracy verified by the review judge
Safe to Cite
Current
73%
73% -- share of websites with technical barrier blocking ai crawlers for Websites (AI search crawlability) (2026)
73% of websites have at least one technical barrier blocking or preventing AI crawler access.
- Includes a wide range of barrier severity, from partially misconfigured robots.txt to full CDN blocks.
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/crawlability-ai-search ↗
Source Article
Technical SEO for AI Crawlability
Original Research
OtterlyAI
· Original study ↗
Methodology
OtterlyAI analysis; includes wide range of barrier severity (misconfigured robots.txt to full CDN block)
Methodology documented
Segmentation
Industrymarketing
Cite this stat
Plain Text
Websites (AI search crawlability): 73% share of websites with technical barrier blocking ai crawlers. Source: OtterlyAI (2026). Via Lighthouse Intelligence -- https://lighthousedata.io/data/websites-technical-barrier-ai-crawler-access
HTML Embed
<blockquote cite="https://lighthousedata.io/data/websites-technical-barrier-ai-crawler-access" 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 websites with technical barrier blocking ai crawlers for Websites (AI search crawlability)<br><small>Source: OtterlyAI (2026) · <a href="https://lighthousedata.io/data/websites-technical-barrier-ai-crawler-access" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Lighthouse Intelligence</a></small></blockquote>
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