The State of Web Access

The internet has never been richer in data, but it is also shifting from a public commons into an ecosystem gated by new rules and new infrastructure.

As agents and bots begin roaming the web at unprecedented scale, many websites are hardening against unwanted visitors. That is altering the practice and the economics of data access.

To understand this shift, we audited the 11,100 most popular landing pages across the globe and thousands more in countries around the world, to understand the specific mechanisms websites use that introduce friction at the point of access. In total, we examined 24,898 unique websites.

The State of Web Access is the largest audit of web access controls ever published.

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