AI Tools ChatGPT Copilot Impact on Law Religion UK Blog Traffic

An earlier post A further examination of AI in legal blogging examined recent changes in the use of Artificial Intelligence in relation to material used on the blog. It focussed on the output of L&RUK, our use of AI in relation to material obtained from various sources, and the potential impact of ChatGBT and Copilot. This present post examines referrals (i.e. effectively the input to the blog) using the statistical information provided by WordPress from various metrics: page views, visitors and referral bodies (websites, AI &c), and their geographical and time-related origin.

Background

WordPress provides its users with information on site traffic through a number of pre-set options [1 ] including: “Last 7 Days”; “Last 30 Days”; “Last 12 Months”; “Last 3 Years”. It also has details for: “Today”; “Month to date”; and “Year to Date”, which are useful in tracking the development of specific issues, but are of less value for comparative purposes. With L&RUK’s worldwide readership, the “Today” results are influenced by the time zone and different responses over the 24 hour period post -publication.

Likewise ” *** to date” information is of limited value when seeking comparisons on due to possible variations in the length of the time period chosen. Consequently, this present analysis uses information for the “Last 7 Days”; “Last 30 Days”; “Last 12 Months”; and “Last 3 Years”.

Referrals

“Referrals” are made to the blog from two distinct sources: from search engines [2 ] and through other web links [3 ]. Search engines are associated with 26.8% to 37.8% of the total number of page views, and of these, the majority are from either Google, (82.34% to 86.28%) with a significant, but smaller number from Bing, (10.4% to 14.0%). Of the remaining referrals through other links, the majority are either from X, or Facebook, with very few via ChatGPT [4 ].

There are also ~1,160 subscribers who receive email notification of each new post as it is published, although these are not identified separately.

Location

In the context of the blog’s strapline “ Issues of law and religion in the United Kingdom – with occasional forays further afield”, it is hardly surprising thar the majority of readers are from the UK. There were 79.5% over the past three year s, falling to 68.9% over the 12 months period when there was a significant readership in the the United States (17.1%)  and China (12.5%). Recent UK readership is 71.41% (30d) and 71.69% (7d) [5 ].

Comment

Search Engines play a significant part in identifying L&RUK to potential users, and as noted earlier, they now rely on AI at almost every stage of the search process—from understanding the query, to ranking results, to generating summaries. Thus whilst the general trend of an increased use of AI is not reflected directly in the above analysis , there is likely to be an indirect effect though the Search Engine searches.

[1 ] A bespoke option is also available.

[2 ] Google; Bing; Duck Duck Go; Yahoo; ecosia; and others.

[3 ] X; Gmail; ChatGPT; Facebook; Inner Temple; Thinking Anglicans; Beaker Folk of Husborne Crawley; Edgepilot; Notebook; and others.

[4 ] X, 1.05% to 6.46%; Gmail, 0.91% to 1.87%; ChatGPT, 0.28% to 1.1%; and Facebook, 0.7% to 3.28%.

[5 ] However, comparing the subject matter of “top ten” posts for this 12 month period, there appeared to be little that would be of specific interest on China or the US.

Cite this article as: David Pocklington, "AI and L&RUK readership" in Law & Religion UK, 2 April 2026, https://lawandreligionuk.com/2026/04/02/ai-and-lruk-readership/

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