Of 36,188 live Irish websites, 1,944 (5.37%) block an AI crawler — 38th of 43 countries — yet 10% have consciously published an AI policy. Irish news sites block AI at 17%, five times the wider web.
Analysis of 41,818,678 live, content-validated websites worldwide · snapshot 2026-07-13 · by Piperic
Ireland — the European home of OpenAI, Google and Meta — runs a cautious web. Of 36,188 live Irish sites, 5.37% block an AI crawler, placing it 38th of 43 countries, more defensive than neighbouring Britain (4.2%). Yet Irish owners who do decide tend to do so clearly: 10.5% have published a policy file and 10.75% an llms.txt, well above the European norm.
The Irish press is markedly defensive: 17.1% of news sites block AI — five times the wider Irish web and among the highest press figures in Europe, alongside the Czech Republic. In a country that hosts the AI industry's European operations, its journalists are notably unwilling to hand over their work for training.
The most-blocked sector overall is education (11.28%), unusual in this report — followed by hobbies (6.43%). And Irish blocking is clean: only 4.1% of GPTBot-blockers accidentally lost ChatGPT Search, well below the global 6.1%.
Share of sites blocking at least one AI crawler — lower = more open. Ireland ranks #38 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:
1,799 Ireland websites block GPTBot to keep their content out of AI training. But 74 of them — 4.1% — 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 Ireland 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 Ireland's biggest website categories.
| Sector | Sites | Blocks AI | llms.txt |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📰 News & media | 146 | 17.12% | 6.85% |
| business and finance | 7,374 | 4.88% | 6.86% |
| home and garden | 3,139 | 5.29% | 12.3% |
| technology and computing | 2,067 | 4.45% | 8.47% |
| medical health | 1,900 | 4.95% | 8.74% |
| attractions | 1,872 | 5.82% | 6.09% |
| style and fashion | 1,555 | 3.22% | 40.96% |
| personal finance | 1,527 | 4.13% | 7.2% |
| education | 1,481 | 11.28% | 5.54% |
| shopping | 1,358 | 4.86% | 25.63% |
| automotive | 1,354 | 5.61% | 9.75% |
| sports | 1,242 | 6.2% | 12.72% |
Ireland news sites block AI 3.2× more often than the national average (17.12% vs 5.37%) — publishers are the most defensive segment of the web.
10,874 Ireland online shops are open to AI crawlers (97.0% of 11,214). 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 Ireland's web is closing — or opening.
Free, no signup — see your site the way AI crawlers do:
How to cite: “According to Piperic's AI Access Report (2026-07-13), based on 36,188 live Ireland websites…” — link to this page.
Download the country dataset (JSON) Global rankings dataset
Sample: 36,188 live, content-validated websites (Ireland, 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.