Piperic
AI Access Report
AI Report
🌍 The AI Access Report · 2026-07-13

🇹🇷 Turkey is among the more AI-cautious webs — but its blockers are precise

Of 53,195 live Turkish websites, 2,905 (5.46%) block an AI crawler — 41st of 43 countries. Travel and real estate lead the blocking, but Turkey has one of the lowest accidental self-exclusion rates in the world.

Analysis of 41,818,678 live, content-validated websites worldwide · snapshot 2026-07-13 · by Piperic

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94.5%open to AI crawlers

Turkey runs one of the more cautious webs in the survey. Of 53,195 live .tr sites, 5.46% block an AI crawler — 41st of 43 countries, above the global norm. Travel (7.91%) and real estate (7.14%) lead the sectoral table, a property-and-tourism defensive pattern.

But Turkey's blocking is unusually deliberate. Only 2.6% of Turkish GPTBot-blockers accidentally shut out ChatGPT Search — one of the lowest accidental-exclusion rates in the entire report, less than half the global average. Where Turkish sites block, they distinguish training bots from search bots almost perfectly.

The press is relatively moderate at 8.12%, and 88.7% of the web sits in silence with only 5.85% having consciously declared a policy. Turkey's profile: cautious by instinct, but precise by execution.

The three numbers that matter

94.54%
AI Training Exposure
share of sites NOT blocking any AI training bot (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot…) — their content can be used for model training.
99.7%
AI Search Visibility
share of sites reachable by AI search crawlers (OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot…) — they can appear in AI answers.
11.43%
AI Policy Maturity
share of sites with ANY conscious, machine-readable AI signal (llms.txt, ai.txt, robots AI rules, ToS clause). Low = the web hasn't decided yet.

Where Turkey stands in the world

Share of sites blocking at least one AI crawler — lower = more open. Turkey ranks #41 of 44 countries analysed.

#1 🇯🇵 Japan1.0%#2 🇨🇳 China1.08%#3 🇩🇪 Germany1.58%#4 🇦🇹 Austria1.82%#5 🇷🇺 Russia1.85%#6 🇫🇷 France2.14%#7 🇧🇪 Belgium2.23%#8 🇪🇪 Estonia2.66%#41 🇹🇷 Turkey5.46%

Neighbours shown for context. Full ranking in the data download.

💬 41st of 43 — among the more cautious webs, with a property-and-tourism defensive core rather than a press-led one.

The four AI postures of Turkey's web

Every website falls into one of four groups, based on what it blocks and what it declares:

88.69%
Open by silence
doesn't block AI and declares nothing — no decision has been made. This is the real story: the vast majority.
5.85%
Consciously open
doesn't block AI and publishes an explicit policy file (llms.txt / ai.txt) — a deliberate yes.
5.16%
Controlled access
blocks training bots but stays visible to AI search — the technically mature strategy.
0.3%
AI-dark
blocks AI search crawlers too — protected, but disappearing from AI answers.
Open by silence: 88.69%Consciously open: 5.85%Controlled access: 5.16%AI-dark: 0.3%88.69%Open by silence
💬 88.7% silent, 5.85% consciously open. Caution driven by a defensive minority against a passive background.

The ChatGPT-invisibility paradox

2,835GPTBot ⛔
73+ OAI-SearchBot ⛔
2.6%ChatGPT Search ✕

2,835 Turkey websites block GPTBot to keep their content out of AI training. But 73 of them — 2.6% — 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.

💬 2.6% accidental self-exclusion — one of the lowest worldwide. Turkish blocking is technically precise; almost no one loses ChatGPT Search by mistake.

Which AI bots does Turkey block?

Share of Turkey sites blocking each crawler in robots.txt.

GPTBot5.33%CCBot5.25%ClaudeBot5.23%Bytespider · TikTok5.22%Google-Extended5.2%Amazonbot5.16%Meta-ExternalAgent5.1%Applebot-Extended5.1%ChatGPT-User0.27%

Bytespider is ByteDance's (TikTok) crawler — it ignores robots.txt more often than the majors, yet it is among the most-blocked.

Industry by industry: who blocks, who doesn't

AI-blocking and llms.txt adoption across Turkey's biggest website categories.

SectorSitesBlocks AIllms.txt
📰 News & media8878.12%4.4%
business and finance19,4915.27%3.48%
technology and computing4,7256.67%6.12%
home and garden4,6904.71%5.05%
automotive2,4025.7%3.75%
style and fashion2,3784.79%14.84%
shopping2,2794.48%8.69%
personal finance1,8944.22%3.22%
medical health1,7454.58%5.16%
food and drink1,3405.0%4.93%
politics1,2123.47%58.0%
travel1,1767.91%4.34%

Turkey news sites block AI 1.5× more often than the national average (8.12% vs 5.46%) — publishers are the most defensive segment of the web.

💬 Travel (7.91%) and real estate (7.14%) lead — a property-and-tourism pattern — while the press (8.12%) stays comparatively moderate.

The e-commerce exposure

7,270 Turkey online shops are open to AI crawlers (94.4% of 7,701). Their product content can already be read, compared and recommended by AI assistants — whether they know it or not.

Platform matters

Share of sites blocking at least one AI bot, by platform:

5.71%WordPress0.83%Shopify5.46%country average

The trend starts here

This is the baseline edition (2026-07-13). Piperic re-measures continuously; the next edition will show how fast Turkey's web is closing — or opening.

💬 Turkey begins cautious but precise. The next edition tracks whether the property and travel sectors ease up as AI search grows.

Check your own website

Free, no signup — see your site the way AI crawlers do:

For journalists — press kit

“Turkey is cautious on the surface but technically sharp underneath: it blocks more than most, yet almost never locks itself out of ChatGPT Search by accident. When Turkish sites block, they know exactly what they're doing,”
— said Attila Rácz-Akácosi, founder of Piperic.

How to cite: “According to Piperic's AI Access Report (2026-07-13), based on 53,195 live Turkey websites…” — link to this page.

Download the country dataset (JSON) Global rankings dataset

Methodology

Sample: 53,195 live, content-validated websites (Turkey, 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.

Country reports

🌍 Worldwide🇩🇪 Germany🇷🇺 Russia🇬🇧 United Kingdom🇳🇱 Netherlands🇫🇷 France🇧🇷 Brazil🇨🇭 Switzerland🇯🇵 Japan🇵🇱 Poland🇦🇺 Australia🇸🇪 Sweden🇨🇳 China🇮🇹 Italy🇨🇦 Canada🇨🇿 Czechia🇧🇪 Belgium🇦🇹 Austria🇪🇸 Spain🇮🇳 India🇨🇴 Colombia🇸🇰 Slovakia🇩🇰 Denmark🇭🇺 Hungary🇲🇽 Mexico🇳🇴 Norway🇰🇷 South Korea🇦🇷 Argentina🇳🇿 New Zealand🇫🇮 Finland🇬🇷 Greece🇺🇦 Ukraine🇨🇱 Chile🇿🇦 South Africa🇷🇴 Romania🇻🇳 Vietnam🇹🇷 Turkey🇪🇪 Estonia🇵🇹 Portugal🇹🇼 Taiwan🇮🇪 Ireland🇮🇱 Israel🇮🇩 Indonesia🇱🇹 Lithuania