Original research · July 2026
Nobody Voted for This Template
The most consequential web-standards decision in American local government is made by a vendor no voter has heard of. Its template leaves out structured data, so a fifth of local government goes dark at once.
Version 2 · rebuilt 5 August 2026 · what changed
Headline finding
Towns that hired a government-website specialist are 12× less likely to be machine-readable than towns that simply used WordPress or Squarespace. Just 4.4% of the 4,108 government sites built on specialist platforms emit structured data, versus 52% of the 4,472 on general-purpose platforms. Specialist vendors run 47.9% of every US government website whose platform we could identify.
Source: Replatform Radar, Nobody Voted for This Template (18,682 domains scanned; 12,047 government and 1,954 university sites reachable). Free to cite with attribution and a link to this page.
Nobody chose this
Thousands of American towns, counties and special districts each bought a website. Each purchase was a local decision — a council vote, a procurement cycle, a budget line. Collectively, without anyone deciding it, they bought one template. A single specialist platform is now the front door to 20.5% of the live US government web — 2,464 sites — and the three largest platforms together account for 47.4%.
That concentration is not, in itself, a scandal. It is an amplifier. One good default in a template like that protects millions of residents at once. One omission erases them just as fast — and nobody votes on either.
The natural experiment
Two fleets of almost exactly the same size make the point without any modelling. The largest government-specialist platform ships one template to 2,464 governments. WordPress is an open platform on which 2,493 governments each made their own independent choices. Same sector, same kinds of towns, same budgets, same year.
Same fleet size. Opposite outcomes.
0.3% of the largest specialist fleet emits structured data, against 59.2% of the WordPress fleet — two nearly identical populations, separated only by who controls the template.
One company, one template
Open platform, many builders
The darkness is not a front-door effect. We fetched one interior page per site wherever a content link was available: across 2,085 CivicPlus interior pages, 0.2% carried structured data. The fleet is dark all the way through.
Hiring the specialist is the risk factor
You would assume that hiring the company which specializes in government websites produces a better civic web than a volunteer wiring up WordPress. For the layer that now decides whether a resident’s question gets an authoritative answer, the opposite is true — in both sectors we measured.
The specialist penalty
Government sites on general-purpose platforms are 12× more likely to be machine-readable than those on government-specialist platforms. In higher education the same gap is 4×.
US government (.gov/.mil)
US higher education (.edu)
| Sector | Platform kind | Sites | Share of identified | Homepage schema | Interior schema |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Government | General-purpose | 4,472 | 52.1% | 52% | 22% |
| Government | Gov specialist | 4,108 | 47.9% | 4.4% | 0.6% |
| Higher ed | General-purpose | 1,062 | 70.1% | 60.4% | 35.4% |
| Higher ed | Ed specialist | 453 | 29.9% | 17.2% | 10% |
The market, vendor by vendor
Every platform running at least 25 identifiable US government sites, largest fleet first. A vendor is only assigned on a platform-specific marker, so these shares are conservative: we identified a platform on 71.2% of reachable government sites and 77.5% of university sites.
A note on names. This public edition identifies government- and education-specialist platforms by neutral label (Specialist Vendor A, B, C…) rather than by company name. The subject here is a category-level pattern — what happens when one template serves thousands of governments — not the conduct of any individual company. Labels are stable and ordered by fleet size, so every figure stays internally consistent, and the method is published in full so anyone can recompute the same measurements independently. General-purpose platforms are named: they are the comparison group and are largely open-source projects rather than vendors under scrutiny.
Who runs the American government web
One specialist platform runs 20.5% of all live US government websites — as large a fleet as WordPress, but assembled from one template rather than 2,493 independent decisions.
Share of live US government websites
| Vendor | Kind | Sites | Share of .gov | Homepage schema | Interior schema | Median readiness |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress | General-purpose | 2,493 | 20.7% | 59.2% | 44.7% | 63.6% |
| CivicPlus | Gov specialist | 2,464 | 20.5% | 0.3% | 0.2% | 63.6% |
| Drupal | General-purpose | 759 | 6.3% | 15.2% | 11.4% | 72.7% |
| Revize | Gov specialist | 755 | 6.3% | 2.3% | 17.6% | 63.6% |
| Wix | General-purpose | 388 | 3.2% | 97.4% | 2.2% | 81.8% |
| GoDaddy Website Builder | General-purpose | 217 | 1.8% | 56.7% | 2.2% | 72.7% |
| Squarespace | General-purpose | 209 | 1.7% | 89% | 97.6% | 81.8% |
| Munibit | Gov specialist | 184 | 1.5% | 0% | 0% | 63.6% |
| Catalis | Gov specialist | 167 | 1.4% | 0% | 0% | 54.5% |
| Granicus | Gov specialist | 138 | 1.1% | 0% | 0% | 90.9% |
| MunicipalImpact | Gov specialist | 131 | 1.1% | 99.2% | 0% | 90.9% |
| Joomla | General-purpose | 104 | 0.9% | 27.9% | 46.3% | 45.5% |
| Apptegy | Gov specialist | 88 | 0.7% | 1.1% | 0% | 81.8% |
| DotNetNuke | General-purpose | 77 | 0.6% | 1.3% | 1.8% | 36.4% |
| Umbraco | General-purpose | 51 | 0.4% | 0% | 0% | 72.7% |
| HubSpot CMS | General-purpose | 51 | 0.4% | 25.5% | 13% | 72.7% |
| Tyler Technologies | Gov specialist | 51 | 0.4% | 41.2% | 20.8% | 63.6% |
| Streamline | Gov specialist | 48 | 0.4% | 0% | 0% | 72.7% |
| Adobe Experience Manager | General-purpose | 44 | 0.4% | 2.3% | 0% | 72.7% |
| Kentico | General-purpose | 39 | 0.3% | 2.6% | 4.8% | 54.5% |
| Municode | Gov specialist | 37 | 0.3% | 0% | 2.8% | 63.6% |
| Rock Solid / QScend | Gov specialist | 25 | 0.2% | 16% | 11.8% | 50% |
The fix is one template change
This is the unusual part. Nothing here requires 2,464 towns to do anything. A single specialist platform adding GovernmentOrganization and LocalBusiness markup to its base template would move a fifth of the American government web in one deploy — the largest single improvement in civic machine-readability available to anyone, and it sits with a handful of product teams.
That is also why this study reports platform categories rather than naming towns or companies. The towns did not make this choice, and the finding is about what template concentration does, not about the conduct of any individual vendor.
Method and limitations
- Population: the US
.gov/.miland.eduregistrant sets — 18,682 domains, of which 14,001 (74.9%) were reachable. Each domain was fetched once at the homepage with a single identified request, plus at most one interior page. No crawling. - Vendor is inferred from response fingerprints (CDN and script hosts, cookies, headers, generator meta, footer markers) and assigned only on a platform-specific marker, so counts under-report rather than over-report. Embedded third-party services — meeting portals, translation and accessibility widgets, mapping — are recorded separately and never counted as the site’s vendor.
- “Machine-readable” means schema.org structured data was detected as JSON-LD. It is a presence check, not a quality audit: we do not assess whether the markup is complete, valid, or well-chosen.
- Interior-page results cover the subset of sites where a content link was available from the homepage (2,844 specialist and 1,429 general-purpose government pages).
- Readiness scores are joined from the single-fetch scans behind our government and higher-education studies, and carry those studies’ limitations.
Sources and related work
The public registries, standards and policy this study builds on.
Corrections and versions
This study is versioned rather than edited. Figures below carry the method version that produced them, and earlier versions remain citable.
Wording, 5 August 2026
The summary above previously said a quarter of local government went dark at once. The largest vendor accounts for 20.5% of reachable government sites, so that has been corrected to a fifth. The underlying figure did not change; the sentence describing it was loose.
Version 2 — 5 August 2026
We audited our own platform detection and found it was matching vendor names appearing anywhere on a page, rather than markers that only appear when a platform is actually running. Because nearly every American town links to its code of ordinances at a Municode address regardless of who built the site, Municode was credited with 512 sites when the true figure is 37. That error also inverted a finding: Municode appeared to be the best-performing specialist at 24.0% structured data, when Municode-built sites in fact emit none. Adobe Experience Manager fell from 193 sites to 44, where a bare three-letter match had been catching unrelated text.
We then clustered the sites we could not attribute at all, by response cookie, favicon hash and security policy, and identified five platform fleets that were invisible to the previous method: Catalis, Munibit, MunicipalImpact.com, GoDaddy Website Builder and DotNetNuke. Several are larger than vendors the first version named. Attribution rose from 67.5% to 71.2% of reachable government sites.
The headline finding survived all of it, and strengthened slightly: the gap between government-specialist platforms and general-purpose ones moved from 11× to 12×. Per-vendor counts changed substantially; the direction and magnitude of the central comparison did not.
- CISA / GSA. .gov registry data (get.gov). The authoritative public list of .gov domains — the population frame for the government half of this study.
- Schema.org. Schema.org — shared structured-data vocabulary. The vocabulary whose presence we measure; GovernmentOrganization and LocalBusiness are the types most relevant to a local government homepage.
- Google Search Central. Introduction to structured data markup. Why machine-readable markup determines whether a page can be quoted rather than merely found.
- Office of Management and Budget. M-23-22: Delivering a Digital-First Public Experience, 2023. Federal policy on modernizing public-facing government websites.
- Digital.gov (GSA). 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act (IDEA) — resources.
- Koster, M., Illyes, G., Zeller, H., Sassman, L.. Robots Exclusion Protocol (RFC 9309), IETF, 2022. The crawl-permission standard this study's single-fetch method respects.
- W3Techs. Usage statistics of content management systems. Independent web-wide platform shares, for comparison against the sector mix reported here.
Cite this
Replatform Radar, Nobody Voted for This Template, July 2026. replatformradar.com/research/civic-monoculture-2026. Licensed CC BY 4.0 — the dataset and every number on this page may be reused with attribution. Ready-to-paste formats:
Replatform Radar, "Nobody Voted for This Template," July 2026, https://replatformradar.com/research/civic-monoculture-2026. Open dataset, CC BY 4.0.
{{cite web |author=Replatform Radar |title=Nobody Voted for This Template |date=2026-07-28 |url=https://replatformradar.com/research/civic-monoculture-2026 |publisher=Replatform Radar |access-date=}}@misc{replatformradar2026monoculture,
author = {{Replatform Radar}},
title = {Nobody Voted for This Template},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://replatformradar.com/research/civic-monoculture-2026}},
note = {Open dataset, licensed CC BY 4.0}
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