Identity & Authority: Durham University – Signal Evidence & AI Readability

Durham University

(https://dur.ac.uk) 📸 Data Snapshot: June 20, 2026
Identity & Authority — The Lens

Inspect the JSON-LD. Is there an Organization or Person schema, and does it carry sameAs links to real external profiles (LinkedIn, socials)? Missing schema or no identity declaration signals an anonymous entity.

Identity & Authority Expert verifiability & Schema depth.
6 Impact Weight: 15 / 100
40% Reputation

Authority is well-established through named faculty, though technical authority markers like JSON-LD schema are missing in the provided data. The site references high-profile individuals such as the Chief Medical Officer and Professor David Alexander, providing a significant digital footprint even if structured data (Person schema) was not detected in this crawl. A technical gap exists where the homepage H1 is empty, which contradicts the positioning of a top-tier global university.

The disconnect between marketing claims and demonstrated performance is very low. The claim of being a leader for employer reputation is backed by a specific 49th in the world ranking. Similarly, the 88 percent graduate employment statistic provides a hard metric for the broader claim of preparing students for the extraordinary.

Identity & Authority is read from the structured data first: whether the site declares who it is in machine-readable schema, with verifiable identity links. Below is the schema captured per page, then the external proof links that support (or fail to support) that identity.

🔗 Identity & Technical Layer — schema JSON-LD: identity chains, entity gaps
Homepage — no schema detected (entity gap)
/search/ — no schema detected (entity gap)
/study/undergraduate/ — no schema detected (entity gap)
/study/postgraduate/ — no schema detected (entity gap)
🛡️ Trust Signals — external proof links that back the declared identity
3Review mentions (all pages)
4External proof links (all pages)
PageReviewsProof links
/ (home) 0 1
/search/ 0 1
/study/undergraduate/ 0 1
/study/postgraduate/ 3 1