460 Indian business domains across ten sectors, read by functional purpose on a frozen instrument. The fifth and final market of the C01 series.
Declared crawler access, and nothing beyond it.
This volume records what 460 Indian business domains declared about AI retrieval crawler access: their published robots.txt policy, meta-robots directives and observed response behaviour, captured in a single frozen run.
It does not measure AI visibility, AI ranking, AI citation, AI recommendation, digital authority or commercial performance. Whether a crawler may fetch a page is a different question from whether an AI system subsequently cites it.
Two denominator levels, both stated explicitly.
The India sample is 460 organisations across ten sectors, 46 per sector: accounting and finance, building trades, education and training, healthcare, hospitality and tourism, legal, professional services, real estate, retail and e-commerce, and technology and SaaS.
Crawler-access policy was analytically determined for 371 of the 460 domains. The remaining 89 returned no readable policy and are excluded from every restriction denominator rather than counted as open.
Meaningful restriction is inclusive of Strict (Whole-site); it is not additional to it.
The five-class functional-purpose taxonomy, applied to all 460 rows.
| Access class | Domains | Share of sample | Share of policy observed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fully open | 200 | 43.5% (200/460) | 53.9% (200/371) |
| Secondary paths restricted | 121 | 26.3% (121/460) | 32.6% (121/371) |
| Functionally open | 25 | 5.4% (25/460) | 6.7% (25/371) |
| Primary content restricted | 12 | 2.6% (12/460) | 3.2% (12/371) |
| Whole site excluded | 13 | 2.8% (13/460) | 3.5% (13/371) |
| No determinable policy | 89 | 19.3% (89/460) | — |
Strict restriction is the whole-site class alone: 13/371 = 3.5%. Meaningful restriction is primary content plus whole site: (12 + 13)/371 = 25/371 = 6.7%.
Most restriction observed in India is neither strict nor meaningful: it is secondary and functional — administrative paths, search endpoints and checkout flows — which leaves primary editorial content retrievable.
Methodological context, not a headline measure.
131 of 371 policy-observed Indian domains (35.3%) declare at least one path whose functional purpose cannot be determined from the policy text alone. Under the frozen taxonomy those paths default to SECONDARY — the conservative treatment — and are logged for review.
India records the lowest unknown-path prevalence of the five markets. Unknown-path treatment affects only the expanded measure; strict and meaningful restriction are unaffected.
The same three measures, across all five C01 markets.
| Market | Policy observed | Strict | Meaningful |
|---|---|---|---|
| Australia | 77.5% (317/409) | 5.0% (16/317) | 11.7% (37/317) |
| United States | 77.2% (624/808) | 3.8% (24/624) | 10.7% (67/624) |
| Great Britain | 71.6% (540/754) | 4.1% (22/540) | 9.6% (52/540) |
| Singapore | 65.7% (176/268) | 4.0% (7/176) | 8.0% (14/176) |
| India | 80.7% (371/460) | 3.5% (13/371) | 6.7% (25/371) |
India shows the highest policy-observed coverage and the lowest restriction on both measures. The series describes this ordering; it does not attribute it to geography. Sample construction, sector mix, hosting patterns and platform defaults differ between markets and are not controlled for.
What was run, and against what.
India access-analysis finality is established. India registry identity-verification finality is not asserted.
The frozen India registry retains non-final identity-verification metadata: root-domain confirmation was not adjudicated, a robots-reachability field was deliberately left unwritten pending a definition fix, and rows remain marked provisional for inclusion purposes.
Those are registry-verification objects. They do not alter the R006-IN crawler-access measurements reported here, because verification status was never an analytical inclusion criterion for the access study. This volume does not describe the India registry as a completed final identity-verification dataset.