.ac.uk TLD audit hub
United Kingdom academic-education second level — restricted to UK higher education and research.
The .ac.uk namespace is the academic second-level zone under .uk, administered by Jisc on behalf of the UK higher-education sector. Eligibility is restricted to UK higher-education institutions, research organizations and a small set of related categories. Verification is rigorous and registration approval can take weeks. The namespace overlays the UK research-network infrastructure (Janet) and many .ac.uk sites have specialized routing and bandwidth policies via Janet. There are around 700 active registrations. DNSSEC is supported and many institutions run their own authoritative DNS. SEO treats .ac.uk as a UK academic authority signal — comparable in link-graph weight to .edu in the US. Email deliverability is excellent within the UK academic ecosystem. We pay attention to accessibility (UK Equality Act) and cookie-consent compliance when auditing .ac.uk sites because both are statutory requirements for UK public-sector bodies.