University Websites as Research Showcases: A Benchmark of 95 Higher Education Institutions in the Western Balkans

University websites are often the first place students, partners, ranking compilers and, increasingly, artificial-intelligence (AI) answer engines look for evidence of research activity. Yet little systematic evidence exists on how well higher education institutions in the Western Balkans present that activity online. This study benchmarks the public websites of 95 accredited universities and university-level colleges across Kosovo, Albania, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. For each homepage we recorded laboratory performance signals, mobile readiness, basic transport and header security, search-engine findability, openness and machine-readability for major AI crawlers, and whether a research, publications or repository page was reachable from the homepage. Scores were combined into six group measures and one total score on a 0–100 scale. Of 95 institutions listed, 89 were measured successfully and 6 could not be fully scored on every dimension. The mean total score was 65.5. Performance and basic security hygiene were the weakest areas for many sites; research links were often present but uneven in quality; AI crawler rules in robots.txt were rarely restrictive, while actual readability of research pages for AI user agents varied. The results describe the size of a visibility gap that can affect recruitment, partnerships, open-science obligations and discovery in both classical search and AI-mediated search. The paper reports what was observed, not how to remediate it. Data snapshot: 09 November 2026 (Europe/Paris).