Of 275,688 live Chinese websites, only 2,984 (1.08%) block an AI crawler — 2nd most open of 43 countries. And 98.4% neither block nor declare a policy, the most passive web in the report.
Analysis of 41,818,678 live, content-validated websites worldwide · snapshot 2026-07-13 · by Piperic
Measured purely on the robots.txt signals this report tracks, the Chinese web is strikingly open. Of 275,688 live .cn sites, only 1.08% block a Western AI crawler — 2nd most open of 43 countries, behind only Japan. (Note: China's own regulatory and network controls sit outside these public web signals; this measures declared crawler policy, not access in practice.)
The defining Chinese number is silence: 98.41% of sites are 'open by silence', the highest in the entire report. Conscious opt-in (0.57%) and llms.txt adoption (0.58%) are the lowest of any country measured — the emerging Western conventions for signalling AI policy have essentially no footprint here. Notably, in our sample zero Chinese news sites block via these tokens.
Where the little blocking exists, it's imprecise: 13.2% of GPTBot-blockers also lost OAI-SearchBot, one of the higher paradox rates — but the base is tiny. China's profile in this dataset is an internet almost entirely untouched by the Western robots.txt-and-llms.txt conversation.
Share of sites blocking at least one AI crawler — lower = more open. China ranks #2 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:
1,937 China websites block GPTBot to keep their content out of AI training. But 256 of them — 13.2% — 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 China 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 China's biggest website categories.
| Sector | Sites | Blocks AI | llms.txt |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📰 News & media | 267 | 0.0% | 0.37% |
| entertainment | 52,596 | 0.41% | 0.0% |
| sensitive topics | 52,127 | 0.12% | 0.0% |
| business and finance | 50,635 | 1.01% | 0.84% |
| technology and computing | 30,548 | 1.8% | 1.19% |
| personal finance | 12,914 | 0.99% | 0.13% |
| sports | 10,451 | 3.84% | 1.31% |
| home and garden | 6,182 | 0.58% | 0.94% |
| video gaming | 5,530 | 1.59% | 0.13% |
| real estate | 5,434 | 0.28% | 0.13% |
| automotive | 4,642 | 0.58% | 1.18% |
| education | 3,935 | 1.07% | 0.79% |
China news sites block AI 0.0× more often than the national average (0.0% vs 1.08%) — publishers are the most defensive segment of the web.
4,470 China online shops are open to AI crawlers (97.3% of 4,596). 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 China'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 275,688 live China websites…” — link to this page.
Download the country dataset (JSON) Global rankings dataset
Sample: 275,688 live, content-validated websites (China, 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.