The STEM Web: 461 Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Websites Reveal the Internet's Trust-Readability Paradox

STEM websites have a paradox at their core: the organizations that produce humanity's most important knowledge are among the worst at communicating it online.

We analyzed 461 STEM websites in LLMSE's database — spanning science laboratories, engineering firms, technology platforms, mathematics resources, and STEM education organizations — and cross-referenced them with SEO, EEAT, WCAG accessibility, readability, and GARM brand safety grades.

The central finding: STEM sites have the highest trust scores on the internet — 50.7% pass EEAT, more than double the web-wide average of 24.5%. But they have the lowest readability of any sector we've studied: only 11.7% pass, one-third the web average of 34.6%. Engineering websites have a 0% readability pass rate. Every single one writes at college or graduate level.

The STEM sector employs 36 million workers in the U.S. alone — 25% of the total workforce — and is projected to grow at 3x the rate of non-STEM employment through 2034. The institutions that drive this growth can demonstrate expertise and authority better than anyone on the web. They just can't explain it in plain language.

The Data

We identified 461 successfully classified STEM domains from a curated dataset of 555 STEM-related websites. These span five major STEM disciplines:

STEM Discipline Distribution

Science dominates at 27.8%, reflecting the breadth of research institutions, laboratories, observatories, and scientific publishers on the web. Engineering and Technology are roughly balanced at ~20% each, covering everything from IEEE and ASME to GitHub and Stack Overflow.

Demographics Snapshot

The gender distribution mirrors the STEM workforce itself: women comprise just 28% of the global STEM workforce, and only 22% of engineering bachelor's degrees go to women. Our finding that 65% of STEM websites target male audiences reflects this structural imbalance. Only 24.2% target female audiences — nearly the inverse of education's 91.9% female targeting. The 10.9% targeting "all" genders is lower than most sectors, suggesting STEM content is heavily segmented by assumed audience gender.

STEM's 97.6% English dominance is the highest of any sector we've analyzed — higher than cybersecurity (87.4%) and finance (~80%). This reflects both the lingua franca of scientific publishing and the Anglo-American dominance of major STEM institutions (NASA, NIH, NSF, IEEE, MIT, Stanford, Caltech). Only 1.8% of STEM sites are in German, the second most common language.

Top Subcategories

Professional associations (ASME, IEEE, ACS, APS) account for the largest single subcategory at 32 domains. These organizations serve as the connective tissue of the STEM ecosystem — setting standards, publishing journals, hosting conferences, and credentialing professionals. Their web presence anchors the sector.

The Trust Paradox: Highest EEAT on the Internet

This is the headline that matters for anyone thinking about how AI search engines will reshape discoverability.

STEM EEAT pass rate (A+B): 50.7%. Web-wide: 24.5%.

STEM websites are more than twice as trustworthy as the average website by EEAT standards. The A-grade rate (15.1% vs 4.3% web-wide) is 3.5x the web average. Only 4.1% earn an F — below even the web-wide F rate of 5.2%.

This makes sense. STEM organizations are built on expertise, authority, and trust — the exact signals EEAT measures. A particle physics laboratory doesn't need to manufacture authority; it has Nobel laureates on staff. A scientific journal doesn't need to fake expertise; peer review is the product. The structured data, author credentials, organizational schema, and citation practices that EEAT rewards are the native language of scientific communication.

EEAT Across Sectors

STEM's 50.7% EEAT pass rate rivals Entertainment (52.1%) — a sector that benefits from rich media metadata, celebrity author profiles, and platform-level schema markup. But where Entertainment's trust signals are often superficial (publication dates, author bios on listicles), STEM's trust signals reflect genuine institutional authority. The 22 A-graded STEM sites include NASA's science portal, NOAA's ocean services, Harvard's Chandra X-ray Observatory, and Caltech's LIGO gravitational wave detector.

EEAT by STEM Discipline

Engineering sites lead at 63.6%, despite the small sample. Professional engineering societies (ASME, ASCE, AIChE) invest heavily in structured content, credentialed author profiles, and organizational schema — the exact signals that drive EEAT scores.

Science follows at 57.6% — research institutions naturally produce content rich in citations, expert authors, and institutional authority.

Technology brings up the rear at 28.6%, closer to the web average. This reflects the technology sector's bias toward product documentation, developer tools, and SaaS platforms — content optimized for utility rather than authority signaling.

The Readability Crisis: STEM Can't Explain Itself

STEM readability pass rate (A+B): 11.7%. Web-wide: 34.6%.

STEM websites are 66% harder to read than the average website. The D+F rate (60.0%) means the majority of STEM content is written at college or graduate level — the reading level that alienates the broadest possible audience.

This aligns with broader research: an analysis of 709,577 scientific abstracts published between 1881 and 2015 found that the readability of scientific texts has been steadily decreasing over time, with acronym frequency increasing 10x since 1956. Scientific papers typically score under 30 on the Flesch Reading Ease scale — classified as "very difficult" — and our web data confirms that this problem extends far beyond journals to the entire STEM web presence.

This is worse than education's already-poor 26.7% readability pass rate. Education sites are 25% harder to read than the web average; STEM sites are 66% harder. The sector that depends on public understanding of science, technology policy, and engineering safety communicates at a level most adults cannot easily parse.

Readability by STEM Discipline

Engineering websites have a 0% readability pass rate. Not one engineering site in our dataset writes at a web-friendly reading level. 81.8% score D or F — graduate-level difficulty. The organizations responsible for bridges, buildings, power grids, and safety standards produce content that most of the public cannot comfortably read.

Technology performs best at 29.6% — still below the web average, but dramatically better than other STEM disciplines. Developer documentation, software blogs, and tech news sites benefit from a culture of plain-language technical writing that emerged from open-source communities, where clear documentation is a competitive advantage.

STEM Education sites (8.7%) are a particular disappointment. These are organizations whose explicit mission is making STEM accessible to learners — Khan Academy, Code.org, science museums, outreach programs. Yet their websites are nearly as hard to read as research laboratories. The gap between mission and execution is stark.

Science sites (10.2%) cluster at graduate-level complexity. Research institutions, scientific journals, and government laboratories write for peer audiences, not public audiences. When NASA's science portal earns an EEAT A but scores poorly on readability, it illustrates the paradox perfectly: unimpeachable authority, impenetrable prose.

SEO: Invisible Expertise

STEM SEO pass rate (A+B): 0.5%. Web-wide: 0.5%.

STEM sites match the web-wide SEO average exactly — which means they fail at the same rate as everyone else. The 92.2% F rate is marginally better than the web-wide 94.1%, but the difference is negligible.

The zero A-grade rate means no STEM website in our dataset achieves top-tier SEO. This is consistent with institutional web culture: research labs, professional societies, and scientific publishers optimize for content authority, not search engine crawlers. Meta descriptions, structured data for search, and canonical URL management are often afterthoughts.

WCAG Accessibility: Mixed Results

STEM WCAG pass rate (A+B): 29.0%. Web-wide: 28.8%.

STEM accessibility is essentially at the web average — a neutral result that masks significant variation between disciplines.

WCAG by STEM Discipline

Science leads accessibility at 33.9%, benefiting from government-funded institutions (NASA, NOAA, Smithsonian) that are legally required to meet Section 508 standards. These mandates create a floor that lifts the entire science web.

Engineering sites have the worst accessibility: 63.6% fail WCAG completely. Professional engineering association websites and industrial suppliers often run on legacy platforms with minimal accessibility investment.

Technology's 18.5% pass rate is surprisingly low for a sector that builds the web. But STEM technology sites skew toward developer tools, documentation platforms, and SaaS dashboards — content built for technical users assumed not to need accessibility accommodations. This is both an assumption and a failure.

The CMS Landscape

WordPress leads at 23.6%, below its ~33% web-wide share — STEM institutions are less dependent on WordPress than the general web. Drupal's 11.9% is 6.6x its web-wide presence (~1.8%), confirming Drupal's stronghold in institutional and scientific web infrastructure. This mirrors education's 8.9% Drupal adoption and reflects Drupal's enterprise permissions, multisite capabilities, and accessibility-first development.

MediaWiki at 2.4% is unique to STEM — scientific communities maintain wikis for collaborative documentation (e.g., nLab for mathematics, various lab wikis). This CMS barely registers in other sectors.

Adobe Experience Manager at 4.8% signals enterprise-grade STEM organizations — large engineering firms, pharmaceutical companies, and research institutions with significant digital budgets.

CMS Impact on EEAT

WordPress STEM sites have the highest EEAT at 62.9% — WordPress's SEO and schema markup plugin ecosystem (Yoast, RankMath) helps STEM organizations surface the trust signals they already possess. Drupal follows at 57.1%.

Adobe Experience Manager underperforms at 25.0% despite being an enterprise platform. AEM's strength is content management at scale, not structured trust signals — large organizations using AEM may have the authority but lack the on-page markup to communicate it.

CMS Impact on WCAG

Drupal leads WCAG in STEM at 35.7%, consistent with its 65.5% pass rate in education. Drupal's accessibility-first development philosophy pays dividends across sectors.

WordPress's 22.9% WCAG pass rate is the lowest among major platforms — the same open-theme ecosystem that enables EEAT plugins also introduces accessibility-breaking themes and plugins.

Server Infrastructure

Cloudflare leads at 37.1%, slightly above its web-wide share (~30%). nginx at 29.0% reflects the technical sophistication of STEM web operations. Apache at 17.1% is below its web-wide share (~17%), suggesting STEM organizations have migrated away from Apache faster than the general web.

IIS at 3.9% is notably higher than most sectors — Microsoft's web server persists in enterprise STEM environments, particularly engineering firms and corporate R&D labs running Windows Server infrastructure.

Server Impact on EEAT

All three major servers perform above the STEM average for EEAT. Cloudflare's 63.3% lead may reflect a selection effect: organizations investing in Cloudflare's CDN/security layer tend to be more technically mature and more likely to implement structured data.

Apache's 51.9% — the lowest of the three — is still more than double the web-wide EEAT average of 24.5%. Even the "weakest" STEM server cohort dramatically outperforms the general web on trust signals.

The Full Scorecard

The pattern is unmistakable: STEM websites are the most trusted and least readable sites on the internet. They excel at demonstrating expertise, experience, authority, and trust — and fail at communicating in language most people can understand.

The discipline-level breakdown sharpens the paradox. Engineering has the highest EEAT (63.6%) and the lowest readability (0.0%) — peak authority, zero accessibility of language. Technology is the only discipline where readability even approaches the web average.

Why This Matters

The readability problem is not academic. It has real consequences for public engagement with science, technology policy, and engineering safety.

For science communication: The plain language movement in science has gained significant momentum — federal agencies like the NIH and FDA now mandate plain language for public-facing content. But our data shows the broader STEM web hasn't followed. When a climate research institute writes at graduate level, it limits public understanding of climate data. When a vaccine research center uses jargon-heavy prose, it cedes the plain-language space to misinformation sources that write at 6th-grade level.

For STEM education: STEM education sites scoring 8.7% on readability — while their mission is explicitly to make STEM accessible — suggests that institutional writing culture overrides organizational mission. The curse of knowledge is real: experts systematically overestimate how much their audience understands.

For engineering and public safety: Engineering organizations that publish safety standards, building codes, and infrastructure assessments at graduate reading level create barriers for the contractors, inspectors, and municipal officials who need to apply that information. A bridge inspection protocol written at Flesch-Kincaid grade 16 is a liability, not an asset.

For AI discoverability: Research shows 97% of AI citations come from pages in the top 20 search results, and AI Overviews now appear in nearly 25% of Google searches. STEM's high EEAT scores position these sites well for AI citation — but only if they're also discoverable. The readability gap creates an emerging problem: AI systems may cite authoritative STEM sources that human readers struggle to parse, creating a new kind of comprehension barrier between expertise and understanding.

What Would Help

The data points to specific, actionable improvements:

1. Plain language layers for public content. STEM organizations should maintain two content tiers: technical content for peer audiences, and plain-language summaries for public audiences. NASA's science portal does this well — many research institutions do not.

2. Readability testing in editorial workflows. Adding Flesch Reading Ease scoring to content management workflows would flag graduate-level prose before publication. Target A-grade (60-100 Flesch score) for any page intended for non-specialist audiences.

3. Structured data adoption by engineering societies. Engineering sites have the highest EEAT but the worst WCAG scores. Adding schema markup for organizations, authors, and technical standards would preserve their authority advantage while improving discoverability.

4. Accessibility investment beyond government mandates. Science sites benefit from Section 508 requirements; engineering and technology sites do not. With the April 2026 deadline for U.S. higher education institutions to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA under updated ADA Title II rules, STEM education sites face particular urgency. Voluntary WCAG adoption — particularly by professional societies that set industry standards — would raise the floor for the entire sector.

5. CMS choice matters. Drupal's consistent accessibility leadership (35.7% WCAG pass in STEM, 65.5% in education) makes it the strongest choice for STEM organizations where accessibility is a priority. WordPress excels at EEAT through its plugin ecosystem but requires deliberate accessibility effort.

This analysis was conducted using LLMSE, which has classified over 1.4 million websites across SEO, EEAT, WCAG accessibility, readability, and GARM brand safety dimensions. The STEM dataset includes 461 classified websites spanning science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and STEM education. All data reflects the database as of March 2026. To analyze your own site, visit llmse.ai/classify.