Of 246,323 live Canadian websites, 9,924 (4.03%) block at least one AI crawler — 22nd of 43 countries. But Canada has one of the highest rates of conscious opt-in anywhere: 11% publish an AI policy file.
Analysis of 41,818,678 live, content-validated websites worldwide · snapshot 2026-07-13 · by Piperic
Canada sits mid-table on openness — 4.03% of its 246,323 live sites block an AI crawler, 22nd of 43 — but leads the world on a quieter metric: 11% have consciously opted in with an llms.txt or ai.txt, and 11.17% publish llms.txt, among the very highest adoption rates in this report. Canadian site owners are unusually likely to have actually decided.
The Canadian press sits in the middle: 6.15% of news sites block AI — above the national average but far below the Australian (25%) or Czech (14.2%) extremes. The most defensive sectors are attractions (7.46%) and real estate (6.76%). Meanwhile 66,000 Canadian shops stay open to AI shopping assistants.
Canada blocks cleanly too: only 5.9% of GPTBot-blockers accidentally locked out ChatGPT Search — below the global 6.1%. The story here isn't fear or naivety; it's an above-average share of owners who engaged with the question and chose to stay open.
Share of sites blocking at least one AI crawler — lower = more open. Canada ranks #22 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:
8,617 Canada websites block GPTBot to keep their content out of AI training. But 512 of them — 5.9% — 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 Canada 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 Canada's biggest website categories.
| Sector | Sites | Blocks AI | llms.txt |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📰 News & media | 1,985 | 6.15% | 3.17% |
| business and finance | 44,125 | 3.2% | 7.06% |
| home and garden | 20,942 | 2.79% | 12.67% |
| technology and computing | 18,629 | 4.34% | 5.33% |
| personal finance | 12,643 | 3.58% | 5.38% |
| real estate | 12,554 | 6.76% | 5.12% |
| medical health | 12,243 | 3.84% | 10.72% |
| hobbies and interests | 10,837 | 4.49% | 13.69% |
| attractions | 9,969 | 7.46% | 5.76% |
| sports | 8,665 | 4.47% | 14.08% |
| style and fashion | 8,506 | 2.27% | 47.85% |
| automotive | 7,919 | 3.51% | 11.09% |
Canada news sites block AI 1.5× more often than the national average (6.15% vs 4.03%) — publishers are the most defensive segment of the web.
64,491 Canada online shops are open to AI crawlers (97.0% of 66,486). 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 Canada'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 246,323 live Canada websites…” — link to this page.
Download the country dataset (JSON) Global rankings dataset
Sample: 246,323 live, content-validated websites (Canada, 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.