Blog / Introducing Qualified Reads, a new benchmark for content engagement

Over the past two years, the digital landscape has changed dramatically. Automated traffic - including bots, scrapers and AI-powered crawlers - has grown from around 32% of all web activity in 2023 to more than 54% in 2025. As a publisher of valuable, expert-led content, Lexology is disproportionately exposed to this trend. Our article pages in particular are among the most heavily crawled areas of our site, and there has been a noticeable spike in activity in recent months.

While this automated activity does not reflect real human readership, it has increasingly distorted analytics across the industry. In some cases, it has even placed unnecessary load on our systems. To ensure that our analytics remain accurate, meaningful, and truly representative of audience engagement, we are implementing an enhanced bot‑filtering approach, powered by Cloudflare, the market leader in bot mitigation technology.

As part of this upgrade, we are introducing a new, refined metric called Qualified Reads. Qualified Reads focus solely on high‑confidence human engagement, filtering out automated or low‑quality activity. This change will ensure reporting for Lexology Engage clients continues to reflect genuine readership rather than inflated traffic caused by bots. Although some may notice a reduction in total read counts as a result, this shift represents a significant improvement in data quality, security, and integrity - not a decline in real engagement. This change will be applied to historic as well as future readership analytics.

Our goal is to provide analytics you can trust. By strengthening our detection thresholds and recalculating historical data using the new filters, we are preserving the continuity of your trendlines while elevating the accuracy of the underlying numbers. This is not just a change in language: it is part of our ongoing commitment to delivering the most reliable audience insights in the market.