I audited 100 public-sector websites in the EU and the US. The regional ranking is noise.

Fifty European and fifty US public-sector homepages, same static audit, same day. Seventy-nine were auditable. The average scores differ by 2.2 points. The failures are almost identical. My first EU-vs-US audit used 40 URLs and produced a 3.7-point gap. On a sample that small, that is sampling error with a chart. So I scaled to 100 URLs and looked for failures that survive a larger n. The ranking stayed noise; the same template-level defects stayed at the top. Methodology I built two convenience samples of 50 homepages each: EU (50): EU institutions (Parliament, Commission, ECB, EIB, agencies), national government portals, and major city portals. US (50): federal departments and agencies, state portals, and major city portals. Each URL was audited once with the Bulk Website Audit Actor on Apify, in four batches of 25. The Actor fetches static HTML with a 20-second timeout, does not execute JavaScript, and returns a 0–100 heuristic score plus issue codes and page statistics. The score is a triage signal, not a WCAG conformance score. Data was collected on 2 November 2026. I did not retry failures: bot protection is part of what an automated audit actually sees. Sample size and exclusions Of the 100 URLs, 21 were excluded: Reason EU US Total HTTP 403 (WAF / bot challenge) 6 12 18 HTTP 429 (rate limit / checkpoint) 1 0 1 HTTP 202 with no content 1 1 2 Excluded total 8 13 21 The blocked pages carried titles such as "Just a moment...", "Access Denied", "Browser check", "Azure WAF", "Not allowed", and "Vercel Security Checkpoint". None were scored as content. No HTTP 200 page was removed for an empty title or a language selector. That left 79 auditable homepages: 42 EU and 37 US (79% of the original sample). Big federal domains — state.gov, defense.gov, hhs.gov, transportation.gov — were among the excluded. A pipeline that ignores status codes would score challenge pages and report nonsense. The US sample therefore skews toward agencies and states that allow automated fetching. Results Metric EU (n=42) US (n=37) Average score 85.5 87.7 Median score 88.0 90.0 Score range 61–97 73–97 Pages scoring ≥90 18 (42.9%) 19 (51.4%) A 2.2-point gap on 42 and 37 pages is not a ranking: the ranges overlap, and the EU sample contains both the lowest score (61) and nine pages at 95 or above. Issue prevalence (share of auditable pages with at least one occurrence) Issue EU (n=42) US (n=37) Missing canonical 42 (100%) 37 (100%) Missing JSON-LD structured data 26 (61.9%) 27 (73.0%) Missing meta description 14 (33.3%) 8 (21.6%) Links without accessible text 20 (47.6%) 11 (29.7%) Multiple 8 (19.0%) 10 (27.0%) Form fields without a label 9 (21.4%) 3 (8.1%) Images without alt 4 (9.5%) 6 (16.2%) Missing 4 (9.5%) 4 (10.8%) Heading level skip 5 (11.9%) 10 (27.0%) Title outside 10–65 characters 3 (7.1%) 5 (13.5%) Short meta description 2 (4.8%) 2 (5.4%) Thin content (