DataBA-D-2026-02

University international-readiness census 2026 — raw-HTML homepage signals

Schema

Known limitations

• Homepage only. Only the homepage of each domain was fetched; international targeting frequently lives on inner pages, language microsites, or country landing pages a homepage may not link with hreflang. A blank hreflang field means "no hreflang in the homepage's raw HTML", not "no international content" — an undercount direction.
• Raw HTML only. Every signal is read from the server-delivered HTML before any JavaScript runs, because the non-rendering crawlers behind AI answers see exactly that. hreflang, canonical, or language tags injected by client-side rendering are invisible here by design; the figures undercount signals present for any consumer that does render.
• Frame, not population. The 500 domains are a documented frame: the U.S. portion ordered by enrollment (surfacing large online and for-profit institutions) and the international portion by Tranco traffic rank. Both skew toward larger, higher-traffic institutions; findings describe this frame and do not generalize to all universities.
• Single-day snapshot. All rows were collected on 2026-07-09; sites change without notice and the data should be assumed perishable. Verify against a current fetch before relying on any row.
• Conservative language checks. The BCP-47-lite validity screen rejects otherwise valid tags with script subtags (zh-Hant, zh-Hans, sr-Latn) or extended/variant tags, so invalid-code counts are an upper bound; the lang_mismatch_flag flags only high-confidence cases; close-language pairs can produce false flags, and sub-threshold mislabels go uncounted.
• Non-analyzed domains. 71 of 500 domains returned no analyzable homepage — 33 with a non-200 status (mostly 403 bot-challenge or access-denied) and 38 with a transport-level failure (DNS/TLS/timeout). These carry identity fields only and are excluded from the readiness denominators in BA-D-2026-02.

FAQ

Does no hreflang mean the university has no international pages?

No. This dataset records only what each homepage declared in its raw, server-delivered HTML. Many institutions run internationalized inner pages, language microsites, or country landing pages that the homepage does not reference with hreflang, and hreflang injected by client-side JavaScript is not captured. A blank means "no hreflang alternate in the homepage's raw HTML", not "no international content anywhere".

Why does a university show a canonical mismatch (canonical_present true, canonical_self_pointing false)?

Because the homepage's canonical link resolves to a different URL than the homepage itself. This is a single homepage snapshot: a canonical can legitimately point to a different path (for example /home) or, less desirably, to another domain entirely. Both same-host-different-path and cross-domain canonicals occur in this release. The dataset flags the condition and lets you inspect the row; it does not infer intent.

What do analyzed = false and an empty analyzed field mean?

analyzed=false means the domain returned a non-200 status (often a 403 bot-challenge) so no page-body signals were computed. An empty analyzed field means the fetch failed at the transport layer (DNS, TLS, timeout, or other connection failure) and no response was received. Either way the row carries no hreflang, canonical, or language signals and is excluded from the readiness denominators.

Why is a code marked invalid (or html_lang_valid false) when it looks correct, e.g. zh-Hant?

The validity screen is a conservative BCP-47-lite check that rejects script subtags (zh-Hant, zh-Hans, sr-Latn) and extended or variant tags by design, so it over-reports rather than under-reports structural problems. Treat "valid" as "valid under the lite check", not "valid under full BCP 47". In this release no hreflang code was marked invalid.

Changelog

• 2026 — Initial release — 500 rows, collection window 2026-07-09.

@techreport{BA-D-2026-02,
  author       = {{Barkhausen AI}},
  title        = {University international-readiness census 2026 — raw-HTML homepage signals (dataset)},
  institution  = {Barkhausen AI},
  year         = {2026},
  url          = {https://barkhausen.ai/data/university-intl-readiness-2026/}
}