Blogstats in a year of intense LLM "training"

Last year I noted the Top Six locations for C@W hits, as follows (in descending order):

Hong Kong / China / USA / Singapore / UK / Norway

2025 has been a bizarre year for blogstats.  Much as I’d like to think the upsurge represents long overdue global recognition for this blog, many other blogs have found the same and the widely accepted explanation is that the latest generation of LLMs, ever hungry for new “training” material, have been voraciously “reading” new bodies of text.  Obviously, the nearly two decades of flawless prose and compelling reasoning to be found on C@W make us a highly suitable educational experience for these eager students.

Anyhow, the “readership” has increased six-fold over 2024, with a mighty spike in June.  Someone in the LLM industry could doubtless explain this in detail.  Interestingly, while the spike has long since receded into the rear view mirror, it has left a pronounced tail in its wake**.  Presumably, the said LLMs keep coming back periodically to check on our latest gems: and I wonder if also their initial burst of reading resulted in a wider dissemination of C@W as a cited source, which ordinary (“human”) www-browsers now access more than previously.

Anyhow, here is the Top 10 for 2025. 

1. Brazil – first by a good distance
2. Singapore
3. USA
4. Vietnam
5. China
6. India
7. UK
8. Japan
9. Bangladesh
10. Norway

Questions:

• Does this mean that electricity is cheaper in Brazil?  Or is it the cost of bandwidth?  I haven’t heard of a rash of data centres being built there.

• To what body of hitherto untapped sources in the digitised world will the LLMs go for their next training binge?  What’s left that is broadly literate, extensive, ignored thus far – and free?  The complete speeches of Stalin, Mao and Castro?  Might it be something of unspeakably awful content, such that LLMs will soon be effing and blinding like a docker and sharing pictures of nudified politicians ..? 

• May we hope that the wholesome diet of C@W wit, wisdom and literary excellence will raise the whole tone of AI output?  (*ahem*)

ND

PS: start thinking about your 2026 predictions …

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** A company of my acquaintance that publishes a notable blog (as a promotional exercise) has suffered the opposite effect.  Its content having been extensively devoured in the same way, it now gets fewer hits, because AI searches give answers based on the LLM’s reading and summarising of that blog.  These days, such searches do at least give links to the original source; but most lazy bastards go no further than the AI summary.  Which, to be fair, characterises much of my own use of AI – given the excellence of the summaries!  (Which is not necessarily a crass, circular assessment: when full reasoning & explanation are incorporated, you can pretty much judge that nothing salient has been omitted or “misunderstood”.  And it’s self-regulating, too: if the search is for an important purpose, obviously you dig deeper.)      

Some established business models are of course being actively trashed by the phenomenon – not to mention the upcoming fate of many professional, semi-professional and clerical-type jobs … 

Source: http://www.cityunslicker.co.uk/2025/12/blogstats-in-year-of-intense-llm.html