Top-level domain segment

AI crawler access on .edu domains

48 of the 473 domains measured in this segment refuse a request from an identified AI user agent at the edge, 10% of the segment, against 2% whose robots.txt disallows an answer engine at the site root. The block that costs these sites citations is not the one written in the file. That answer-engine rate is 4.5 points below the corpus rate of 7%, which is itself measured across 30,225 domains.

Mean AI access score across those 473 domains is 78.3 of 100, 32 of them publish an llms.txt (7%), and 191 publish structured data an answer engine can parse (40%).

473
domains measured
78.3
mean AI access score of 473
2%
block an answer engine (10 of 473)
7%
publish llms.txt (32 of 473)

Block rate by crawler, inside this segment robots.txt at the site root

CrawlerOperatorContent used forBlock rateBlockingMeasured
SemrushBot-OCOB Semrush training 2.5% 12 473
Bytespider ByteDance training 2.5% 12 473
GPTBot OpenAI training 1.9% 9 473
anthropic-ai Anthropic training 1.5% 7 473
omgilibot Webz.io training 1.3% 6 473
ImagesiftBot ImageSift (Hive) training 1.3% 6 473
Amazonbot Amazon training 1.3% 6 473
omgili Webz.io training 1.1% 5 473
ClaudeBot Anthropic training 1.1% 5 473
ChatGPT-User OpenAI live retrieval 1.1% 5 473
CCBot Common Crawl Foundation archive 1.1% 5 473
Scrapy Zyte (open-source framework) training 0.8% 4 473
PerplexityBot Perplexity answer index 0.8% 4 473
Diffbot Diffbot training 0.8% 4 473
YouBot You.com answer index 0.6% 3 473
Google-Extended Google training 0.6% 3 473
cohere-ai Cohere live retrieval 0.6% 3 473
Meta-ExternalAgent Meta training 0.4% 2 473
FacebookBot Meta training 0.4% 2 473
Applebot-Extended Apple training 0.4% 2 473
Timpibot Timpi training 0.2% 1 473
TikTokSpider ByteDance live retrieval 0.2% 1 473
Perplexity-User Perplexity live retrieval 0.2% 1 473
Applebot Apple answer index 0.2% 1 473
AI2Bot Allen Institute for AI training 0.2% 1 473
PanguBot Huawei training 0.0% 0 473
OAI-SearchBot OpenAI answer index 0.0% 0 473
OAI-AdsBot OpenAI live retrieval 0.0% 0 473
msnbot Microsoft answer index 0.0% 0 473
MistralAI-User Mistral AI live retrieval 0.0% 0 473
MistralAI-Training Mistral AI training 0.0% 0 473
MistralAI-Index Mistral AI answer index 0.0% 0 473
Meta-WebIndexer Meta answer index 0.0% 0 473
Meta-ExternalFetcher Meta live retrieval 0.0% 0 473
Meta-ExternalAds Meta training 0.0% 0 473
Kangaroo Bot Kangaroo LLM training 0.0% 0 473
GoogleOther Google training 0.0% 0 473
Googlebot-News Google answer index 0.0% 0 473
Googlebot Google answer index 0.0% 0 473
Google-CloudVertexBot Google live retrieval 0.0% 0 473
facebookexternalhit Meta live retrieval 0.0% 0 473
DuckAssistBot DuckDuckGo live retrieval 0.0% 0 473
cohere-training-data-crawler Cohere training 0.0% 0 473
Claude-User Anthropic live retrieval 0.0% 0 473
Claude-SearchBot Anthropic answer index 0.0% 0 473
Bingbot Microsoft answer index 0.0% 0 473
Amzn-User Amazon live retrieval 0.0% 0 473
Amzn-SearchBot Amazon answer index 0.0% 0 473

Block rate is the share of this segment's domains holding a policy record for that agent whose robots.txt disallows it at the site root, shown with its numerator and denominator. Denominators differ between agents because a record only exists once a domain has been measured for it. A domain serving no robots.txt counts as allowing everything, which is what the standard specifies.

Most accessible

DomainScoreEngines blockedllms.txt
1 umbc.edu 96 0 yes
2 qu.edu 95 0 no
3 tamu.edu 95 0 no
4 internet2.edu 95 0 no
5 mtholyoke.edu 95 0 no
6 hss.edu 95 0 yes
7 eiu.edu 94 0 yes
8 wellesley.edu 93 0 no
9 umt.edu 93 0 yes
10 arizona.edu 93 0 no
11 amrita.edu 92 0 no
12 rasmussen.edu 92 0 yes
13 ohio.edu 92 0 no
14 indstate.edu 92 0 no
15 purdueglobal.edu 92 0 no

Highest AI access scores among the 473 domains measured in this segment.

Least accessible

DomainScoreEngines blockedllms.txt
1 claremont.edu 39 0 no
2 utmb.edu 46 0 no
3 escatter11.fullerton.edu 50 0 no
4 wichita.edu 50 0 yes
5 brandeis.edu 51 0 no
6 uga.edu 51 0 no
7 msu.edu 51 0 yes
8 bsu.edu 52 0 no
9 upf.edu 56 0 no
10 wvu.edu 56 0 no
11 vt.edu 56 0 no
12 stsci.edu 57 0 no
13 musc.edu 57 0 no
14 icsi.edu 57 0 no
15 ceu.edu 58 4 no

Lowest AI access scores among the same 473 domains.

Compare with the rest of the grouping top-level domain segments

The largest 12 other segments in this grouping, ordered by size. The share beside each is that segment's own answer-engine block rate over its own count. Full table on the segments index.

What this segment does not tell you read this before citing it

A top-level domain is a weak proxy for jurisdiction. Most of them are open to any registrant anywhere, so a domain under a country-code registry may be operated from outside that country by a company no local law reaches. Read these rows as differences between registration communities and the publishing cultures inside them, not as differences between legal regimes.

Measure your own domain

The audit that produced every number on this page runs on any domain in about six seconds: robots.txt resolved for 48 agents, then live requests sent as four of them to see whether the edge agrees with the file.