Wikipedia Traffic Drops as AI Answers Eat the Free Encyclopedia

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The Wikimedia Foundation announced this week that human traffic to Wikipedia fell roughly 8% between May and August compared to the same period last year. The decline came into focus after the foundation discovered that sophisticated bots, primarily from Brazil, had been disguising themselves as human visitors.

After updating its detection systems in May, the foundation reclassified traffic data and found much of the unusually high traffic in May and June came from bots built to evade detection. The revised numbers revealed what many in publishing already knew: fewer people visit Wikipedia directly because search engines now provide answers on their own pages.

“After making this revision, we are seeing declines in human pageviews on Wikipedia over the past few months, amounting to a decrease of roughly 8% as compared to the same months in 2024,” Marshall Miller, wrote. “We believe that these declines reflect the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information, especially with search engines providing answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content.”

AI is not just killing Wikipedia. Data from Pew Research showed median year-over-year referral traffic from Google Search to premium publishers has decreased almost every week during May and June 2025, with losses outpacing gains two-to-one. Nearly 60% of all Google searches end up in an AI summary instead of promoting the reading of the actual source.

Publishers across industries are sounding alarms and resorting to lawsuits to get some protection. Danielle Coffey, who leads the News/Media Alliance representing more than 2,000 outlets, said Google is using publisher content without compensation while offering no meaningful way to opt out without disappearing from search entirely.

"It's parasitic, it's unsustainable, and it poses a real existential threat to many in our industry,” she said.

The volume of AI content online is rising fast. Research from SEO firm Graphite found that as of November 2024, almost half of new web articles were generated using AI in some form, up from just 5% before ChatGPT's launch. A post by Ask Perplexity on X claimed AI content went from around 5% in 2020 to 48% by May 2025, with projections saying 90% or more by next year.

The Wikimedia Foundation said fewer visits to Wikipedia could mean that fewer volunteers grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors support the work. The foundation is responding by enforcing policies for third-party access, developing a framework for attribution, and experimenting with ways to bring free knowledge to younger audiences on platforms like YouTube and TikTok.

The foundation said Wikipedia's human knowledge is more valuable to the world than ever before, 25 years since its creation. The question is whether the platforms using that knowledge will support the ecosystem that creates it.

The Wikipedia Foundation did not immediately respond to a request for comments by Decrypt.