Lawyers acting for the Arsenal and England defender have set up a website called www.ashleycolesurvey.com, which invites people to answer a series of questions about “newspaper articles that are of concern”.

The legal representatives hope to show that readers of the News of the World and The Sun, which published stories about the alleged bisexuality of unnamed Premiership players, concluded that the articles were about Cole even though he was not named.

It is understood that they are also seeking to prove that the newspaper stories prompted many internet sites to identify Cole. Respondents to the online questionnaire must be willing to be interviewed as possible witnesses in civil court proceedings.

Links to the survey have been posted on other internet sites, including PinkNews. In less than two days, people logging on to pinknews.co.uk have clicked through to ashleycolesurvey.com more than 200 times. Nearly 1,000 blogs have provided links to PinkNews.

Graham Shear, Cole’s solicitor, began proceedings last week for harassment, breach of privacy and libel.

Mr Shear said: “These proceedings were commenced because these newspapers published false and offensive articles designed to tell readers that Ashley had behaved in what the News of the World described as a ‘perverted’ way with other professional footballers.

“The newspapers knew there was no basis to name Ashley but arranged the articles and pictures in such a way that readers would identify him. There is no truth whatsoever in these allegations. Ashley Cole will not tolerate this kind of cowardly journalism or let it go unchallenged.”

Among the questions on the solicitor’s questionnaire is “Did you read any stories about a video of ‘gay Premiership footballers’ in any of the following newspapers?” The survey goes on to list The Sun and the News of the World and a series of dates on which the stories appeared.

A number of questions centre on the respondent’s use of the internet, including “Did you contribute to any internet chat rooms or websites about the stories that you read?”

Mr Shear said: “We want to identify people who are willing to be possible witnesses and who have read one or more of the newspaper articles about which we are concerned.”

Media law experts said that it was unusual for a solicitor to use an online questionnaire to gather evidence for a libel case. Duncan Lamont, head of media at Charles Russell, said: “This sort of thing has been done before but not in libel cases. It is exceptional in this sort of case. But this case will not be won or lost by whatever comes forward from a website saying did you think more or less or my client. I suspect it will have a greater PR impact than it is likely to have in a court of law.”

This week Cole’s solicitor asked Google to disclose why typing his client’s name into the internet search engine generated “See results for: ashley cole gay”.

Although internet experts say that it is likely that the result was generated by software trawling a large number of websites, Cole’s solicitors want to know when and what prompted the process. Google is notoriously protective of its methods and it is not yet known whether the search engine will reveal sensitive information. There is no suggestion that Cole is gay or bisexual.

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