Of 212,506 live Belgium websites, only 4,729 (2.23%) block at least one AI crawler in robots.txt. Most site owners have never made a decision about AI at all.
Analysis of 41,818,678 live, content-validated websites worldwide · snapshot 2026-07-13 · by Piperic
Share of sites blocking at least one AI crawler — lower = more open. Belgium ranks #7 of 44 countries analysed.
Neighbours shown for context. Full ranking in the data download.
Every website falls into one of four groups, based on what it blocks and what it declares:
3,804 Belgium websites block GPTBot to keep their content out of AI training. But 333 of them — 8.8% — ALSO block OAI-SearchBot, most likely by accident. Those sites have removed themselves from ChatGPT Search results entirely: protected from training, but invisible where their customers now search.
GPTBot (training) and OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT Search) are independent robots.txt tokens — blocking one does not block the other.
Share of Belgium sites blocking each crawler in robots.txt.
Bytespider is ByteDance's (TikTok) crawler — it ignores robots.txt more often than the majors, yet it is among the most-blocked.
AI-blocking and llms.txt adoption across Belgium's biggest website categories.
| Sector | Sites | Blocks AI | llms.txt |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📰 News & media | 536 | 9.7% | 2.99% |
| business and finance | 31,737 | 1.95% | 4.32% |
| home and garden | 24,741 | 1.91% | 5.4% |
| technology and computing | 16,413 | 2.27% | 3.51% |
| attractions | 11,012 | 2.63% | 2.93% |
| hobbies and interests | 9,708 | 2.12% | 4.66% |
| medical health | 9,463 | 3.3% | 3.68% |
| style and fashion | 8,618 | 1.89% | 13.66% |
| sports | 8,354 | 1.86% | 4.62% |
| healthy living | 7,524 | 1.66% | 5.06% |
| automotive | 7,285 | 2.86% | 4.08% |
| fine art | 7,256 | 1.64% | 4.27% |
Belgium news sites block AI 4.3× more often than the national average (9.7% vs 2.23%) — publishers are the most defensive segment of the web.
46,459 Belgium online shops are open to AI crawlers (98.0% of 47,431). Their product content can already be read, compared and recommended by AI assistants — whether they know it or not.
Share of sites blocking at least one AI bot, by platform:
This is the baseline edition (2026-07-13). Piperic re-measures continuously; the next edition will show how fast Belgium's web is closing — or opening.
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How to cite: “According to Piperic's AI Access Report (2026-07-13), based on 212,506 live Belgium websites…” — link to this page.
Download the country dataset (JSON) Global rankings dataset
Sample: 212,506 live, content-validated websites (Belgium, ccTLD-based assignment), out of 41,818,678 live domains analysed worldwide. “Live” = HTTP 200 and not parked. “Blocks AI” = the site's robots.txt disallows at least one of 14 known AI crawlers. llms.txt/ai.txt = the file exists at the site root. Snapshot: 2026-07-13 (frozen — numbers do not move with the live crawl). Full-web note: these figures cover the ENTIRE live web including the long tail; industry headlines like “25% of top sites block GPTBot” measure only large publishers — both are true, they measure different things. Country assignment via ccTLD under-counts .com/.org sites; treat US figures as indicative.
Press contact: press@piperic.com · Data: Piperic Business Intelligence
Every number on this page is reproducible from the public dataset above.