Top-level domain segment

AI crawler access on .gov domains

40 of the 173 domains measured in this segment refuse a request from an identified AI user agent at the edge, 23% of the segment, against 3% 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 3.7 points below the corpus rate of 7%, which is itself measured across 16,934 domains.

Mean AI access score across those 173 domains is 68.7 of 100, 1 of them publish an llms.txt (0.6%), and 32 publish structured data an answer engine can parse (18%).

173
domains measured
68.7
mean AI access score of 173
3%
block an answer engine (6 of 173)
0.6%
publish llms.txt (1 of 173)

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

CrawlerOperatorContent used forBlock rateBlockingMeasured
ClaudeBot Anthropic training 3.5% 6 172
Bytespider ByteDance training 2.9% 5 172
SemrushBot-OCOB Semrush training 2.3% 4 172
GPTBot OpenAI training 2.3% 4 172
ChatGPT-User OpenAI live retrieval 2.3% 4 172
CCBot Common Crawl Foundation archive 2.3% 4 172
Amazonbot Amazon training 2.3% 4 172
Applebot-Extended Apple training 1.7% 3 172
anthropic-ai Anthropic training 1.7% 3 172
PerplexityBot Perplexity answer index 1.2% 2 172
Google-Extended Google training 1.2% 2 172
Bingbot Microsoft answer index 1.2% 2 172
YouBot You.com answer index 0.6% 1 172
Timpibot Timpi training 0.6% 1 172
TikTokSpider ByteDance live retrieval 0.6% 1 172
Scrapy Zyte (open-source framework) training 0.6% 1 172
PanguBot Huawei training 0.6% 1 172
omgilibot Webz.io training 0.6% 1 172
omgili Webz.io training 0.6% 1 172
OAI-SearchBot OpenAI answer index 0.6% 1 172
msnbot Microsoft answer index 0.6% 1 172
Meta-ExternalAgent Meta training 0.6% 1 172
Kangaroo Bot Kangaroo LLM training 0.6% 1 172
ImagesiftBot ImageSift (Hive) training 0.6% 1 172
GoogleOther Google training 0.6% 1 172
Googlebot-News Google answer index 0.6% 1 172
facebookexternalhit Meta live retrieval 0.6% 1 172
DuckAssistBot DuckDuckGo live retrieval 0.6% 1 172
Diffbot Diffbot training 0.6% 1 172
cohere-training-data-crawler Cohere training 0.6% 1 172
cohere-ai Cohere live retrieval 0.6% 1 172
Applebot Apple answer index 0.6% 1 172
AI2Bot Allen Institute for AI training 0.6% 1 172
Perplexity-User Perplexity live retrieval 0.0% 0 172
OAI-AdsBot OpenAI live retrieval 0.0% 0 172
MistralAI-User Mistral AI live retrieval 0.0% 0 172
MistralAI-Training Mistral AI training 0.0% 0 172
MistralAI-Index Mistral AI answer index 0.0% 0 172
Meta-WebIndexer Meta answer index 0.0% 0 172
Meta-ExternalFetcher Meta live retrieval 0.0% 0 172
Meta-ExternalAds Meta training 0.0% 0 172
Googlebot Google answer index 0.0% 0 172
Google-CloudVertexBot Google live retrieval 0.0% 0 172
FacebookBot Meta training 0.0% 0 172
Claude-User Anthropic live retrieval 0.0% 0 172
Claude-SearchBot Anthropic answer index 0.0% 0 172
Amzn-User Amazon live retrieval 0.0% 0 172
Amzn-SearchBot Amazon answer index 0.0% 0 172

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 lbl.gov 90 0 no
2 uspto.gov 88 0 no
3 nasa.gov 87 0 no
4 usa.gov 87 0 no
5 sba.gov 87 0 no
6 whitehouse.gov 86 0 no
7 medlineplus.gov 86 0 no
8 doi.gov 85 0 no
9 doe.gov 84 0 no
10 energy.gov 84 0 no
11 drugabuse.gov 84 0 no
12 texas.gov 84 0 no
13 samhsa.gov 83 0 no
14 lanl.gov 83 0 no
15 recreation.gov 82 0 no

Highest AI access scores among the 173 domains measured in this segment.

Least accessible

DomainScoreEngines blockedllms.txt
1 regulations.gov 41 0 no
2 in.gov 44 0 no
3 clinicaltrials.gov 45 0 no
4 studentaid.gov 47 0 no
5 huduser.gov 48 0 no
6 miamidade.gov 49 0 no
7 usaid.gov 50 0 no
8 dataprivacyframework.gov 50 0 no
9 sd.gov 51 0 no
10 mn.gov 52 0 no
11 supremecourt.gov 53 0 no
12 az.gov 53 0 no
13 texasattorneygeneral.gov 54 6 no
14 cia.gov 55 2 no
15 ohio.gov 57 0 no

Lowest AI access scores among the same 173 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.