The State of Higher-Ed CMS Readiness 2026 (dataset)

CMS platform share, Drupal version/end-of-life status, and eleven SEO/security readiness signals measured across the US .edu registrant set — 2,368 domains, 1,796 live and measurable. Headline findings: Drupal runs at 5× its web-wide rate in higher education (18.0% vs 3.6%), yet universities emit less structured data than the average website (43.4% vs 50.1%), leaving 31.4% of institutions cleanly citable by AI answer engines; 6.8% of version-exposing university Drupal is end-of-life. Method in brief: one polite, identified HTTP GET per homepage; no crawling. Signals are objective presence checks observable from a single fetch. CMS inferred from response fingerprints (conservative; unfingerprinted sites grouped as Unknown). Unreachable/bot-walled sites excluded rather than counted as failures. Licensed CC BY 4.0 — reuse with attribution and a link to the study page. Full study, method & limitations, and living data table: replatformradar.com/research/higher-ed-cms-readiness-2026