It is difficult to measure exactly how many papers have been downloaded. Here is an estimate that does not include downloads made by “robot” readers from places such as Google, and it does not include partial downloads or failed attempts to download. Visits is the number of unique IP addresses recorded per hour. With social media many people might visit in one hour, and they will all have the same IP address. This will register as only one unique visit, so this is an underestimate of the number of human visitors.
Here are the total downloads and visits since LENR-CANR.org began in 2002:
The spreadsheet for the graphs shown below (Fig. 1, 2) is here.
In 2017 the number of visits and downloads began to decline (Fig. 2). In 2023, the trend abruptly reversed. Downloads increased from 5,775 in March 2023 to more than 60,000 in the first months of 2026. This increase correlates with the increased use of AI (Fig. 1). Pearson correlation 0.86. There are two possible reasons for this.
First, AI finds technical scientific information more readily than conventional search tools such as Google.
Second, AI is better at finding controversial information. It is difficult to find papers at mainstream websites. There are no links to cold fusion papers at sites such as Nature magazine, Scientific American or the Washington Post. Some journalists think that cold fusion was never replicated and no papers were published. Wikipedia is the most often cited source on the internet. The editors there do not allow positive comment about cold fusion or links to papers. Positive comments and link are deleted within an hour. AI robot crawlers, such as openai.com/gptbot first came to LENR-CANR.org in June 2023. When readers asked for references to papers, ChatBots began giving links to LENR-CANR.org. In general, an AI evaluation of cold fusion will comport with mainstream opinions. An AI will say that cold fusion is impossible, or unproven. However, unlike human journalists, an AI does not say that cold fusion was never replicated and there are no papers.
The increase in downloads lagged the number of ChatGPT users for about a year even after the crawlers began gathering information. Perhaps this is because people took time to learn to use AI, and began using it more intensely in 2024.
Fig. 2. Number of Acrobat files (pdf papers) downloaded per month since LENR-CANR.org began in 2002. The trendline is a 6-degree polynomial.
Fig. 3. Cumulative number of Acrobat files (pdf papers) downloaded since LENR-CANR.org began.
Fig. 4. Google Trends for: cold fusion + LENR -coldfusion