There is increasing interest in developing indicators to assess the state of benthic communities in shelf seas primarily affected by bottom trawling. Yet, many indicators have been developed in specific geographic regions making it difficult to determine their broader applicability. In the study, we systematically evaluated the complementarity, sensitivity, and specificity of 18 indicators in response to the pressure of bottom trawling using a shared dataset with broad regional representation. We found distinct clusters of indicators with similar response patterns. In addition, we identified the type of indicator that is most sensitive to bottom-trawling pressure