.uk TLD audit hub
United Kingdom second-level TLD — direct registration alongside the more common .co.uk.
The .uk namespace has historically been a third-level zone — businesses register domains under .co.uk, academia under .ac.uk, and government under .gov.uk. In 2014 Nominet, the registry, opened direct second-level registration at .uk for the first time, and post-2019 those names became fully available to anyone. Existing .co.uk holders had right-of-first-refusal during a multi-year transition window. Practical adoption has been mixed: many British businesses retained their .co.uk because of accumulated link equity and brand recognition, while newer startups have used the bare .uk for cleaner URLs. The registry enforces verification on registrant contact details, and Nominet has a well-respected dispute resolution service. SEO treats .uk and .co.uk equivalently as UK geotargeting signals. DNSSEC and registry lock are on parity with major gTLDs. We pay specific attention to canonicalization on UK brands that own both .uk and .co.uk — duplicate content split between the two is a common audit finding.