Original research · Vertical · July 2026
The State of Government CMS Readiness 2026
We measured every reachable US government homepage in a set of 16,314 .gov and .mil domains — 9,324 were live and measurable — against the eleven signals that decide whether a site keeps its search and AI visibility through a replatform. Government is the worst-performing segment we have measured: the lowest grades, the least structured data, and the sharpest gap on the one signal that now decides whether an AI assistant will quote a page.
Headline finding
Government websites are the least AI-visible on the web. Just 25.6% emit structured data — 2.0× less than the general web (50.1%) — and only 14.7% are cleanly citable by an AI answer engine. That is precisely where a citizen’s question — a deadline, an eligibility rule, an office’s hours — most needs an authoritative machine-readable source, and 68.5% of government sites grade D or F.
Source: Replatform Radar, State of Government CMS Readiness 2026 (n=9,324 measurable .gov/.mil sites). Free to cite with attribution and a link to this page.
The AI-visibility gap widens the closer you get to government
Read across three populations we’ve measured this year and the pattern is unmistakable: the more public and authoritative the content should be, the less machine-readable it actually is. Government sits at the bottom of every column.
| Segment | Overall readiness | Structured data | AI-citable |
|---|---|---|---|
| General web | 69.4% | 50.1% | 36.8% |
| Higher education | 70% | 43.4% | 31.4% |
| Government | 62.6% | 25.6% | 14.7% |
Government is nearly universally on HTTPS (99.7%) and gets page titles right (91.9%) — the basics are in place. What is missing is the structured, answer-engine-ready layer: schema markup, canonical tags, and clean metadata. Those are exactly the signals a CMS migration drops on the floor when nobody is measuring, and they are the difference between an agency being named in an AI answer and being skipped.
Grades: two in three government sites are D or F
Scored across all eleven signals, 68.5% of measured government homepages land at grade D or F — far worse than the open web (42.3%) or higher education (42.6%). The long tail of county, municipal and special-district sites, often maintained with little budget, pulls the whole segment down.
| Grade | A | B | C | D | F |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Share of .gov | 9% | 9.6% | 12.9% | 29.5% | 39% |
What government runs — and the Drupal risk underneath it
Where a platform is detectable, WordPress leads and Drupal runs at 2.1× its web-wide rate — government is, after higher ed, Drupal’s second home. That matters because of what is running underneath: of the 603 government Drupal sites that expose a version, 15.8% (95 sites) are on end-of-life Drupal 7, 8 or 9 — unsupported, unpatched public infrastructure. Drupal 7 alone is the single largest version bucket among the aging tail.
| Platform | Share of .gov |
|---|---|
| WordPress | 27% |
| Drupal | 7.6% |
| Wix | 2.3% |
| Squarespace | 1.3% |
| Joomla | 0.8% |
| Concrete CMS | 0.4% |
| Umbraco | 0.4% |
| Kentico | 0.3% |
| Adobe Experience Manager | 0.3% |
| HubSpot CMS | 0.2% |
| Drupal version | Sites | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Drupal 10 | 331 | Supported |
| Drupal 11 | 177 | Supported |
| Drupal 7 | 69 | End-of-life |
| Drupal 9 | 19 | End-of-life |
| Drupal 8 | 7 | End-of-life |
Version is only observable on the sites that publish a generator tag, so the true end-of-life count is a floor, not a ceiling.
Readiness by platform
Every CMS with at least fifteen measurable government sites, by overall readiness and the two signals most often lost in a migration — structured data (SEO / AI visibility) and security headers.
| Platform | Sites | Readiness | Structured data | Security headers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress | 2,522 | 61.7% | 59% | 26.9% |
| Drupal | 705 | 71.6% | 11.1% | 99.4% |
| Wix | 210 | 85% | 97.6% | 100% |
| Squarespace | 124 | 85.5% | 96.8% | 99.2% |
| Joomla | 73 | 47.5% | 19.2% | 50.7% |
| Concrete CMS | 39 | 63.8% | 2.6% | 74.4% |
| Umbraco | 37 | 77.9% | 0% | 91.9% |
| Kentico | 30 | 56.3% | 3.3% | 63.3% |
| Adobe Experience Manager | 26 | 75.2% | 23.1% | 65.4% |
| HubSpot CMS | 15 | 67.2% | 13.3% | 73.3% |
Method & limitations
- Population: the US
.gov/.milregistrant set (federal, state, local, tribal and territorial). Each domain was fetched once with a single identified GET request; no crawling. 9,324 of 16,314 were reachable and measurable — the rest were dead, parked, or bot-walled and are excluded rather than counted as failures. - CMS and version are inferred from response fingerprints and the generator meta. A large Unknown share is expected in government (bespoke and vendor platforms) and is excluded from per-platform cuts, so counts under-report rather than over-report.
- Signals are presence checks, not quality audits — “has structured data” means schema was detected, not that it was complete or valid.
- End-of-life percentages are of the Drupal sites that expose a version; the true count is a floor.
Cite this
Replatform Radar, The State of Government CMS Readiness 2026, July 2026. replatformradar.com/research/government-cms-readiness-2026. Licensed CC BY 4.0. See also our higher-education study and the web-wide readiness study.
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