In short
- Human visits to Wikipedia fell 8% year-on-year, with Wikipedia attributing this to people visiting AI summaries instead of consulting Wikipedia.
- AI summaries and search engines now answer questions directly, with nearly 60% of Google searches ending in on-page comments powered by Wikipedia content.
- Publishers call the trend “existential” and accuse technology platforms of using their work without compensation.
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The Wikimedia Foundation announced this week that human traffic to Wikipedia fell by about 8% between May and August compared to the same period last year. The decline came into focus after the foundation discovered that sophisticated bots, mainly from Brazil, had disguised themselves as human visitors.
After updating its detection systems in May, the foundation reclassified traffic data and found that much of the unusually high traffic in May and June came from bots built to evade detection. The revised figures revealed what many publishers already knew: fewer people are visiting Wikipedia directly because search engines now provide answers on their own pages.
“Following this revision, we have seen a decline in human page views on Wikipedia in recent months, representing a decline of approximately 8% compared to the same months in 2024,” Marshall Miller wrote. “We believe these declines reflect the impact of generative AI and social media on the way people search for information, especially as search engines provide answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content.”
AI isn’t just killing Wikipedia. Pew Research data shows that average annual referral traffic from Google Search to premium publishers declined almost every week in May and June 2025, with losses twice as great as gains. Nearly 60% of all Google searches end in an AI summary instead of advancing reading from the actual source.
Publishers from various sectors are sounding the alarm and resorting to lawsuits to get some protection. Danielle Coffey, leader of the News/Media Alliance that represents more than 2,000 outlets, said Google uses content from publishers without compensation while not providing a meaningful way to opt out without disappearing from search results entirely.
“It is parasitic, unsustainable and poses a real existential threat to many in our industry,” she said.
The volume of AI content online is rising rapidly. Research from SEO firm Graphite found that as of November 2024, almost half of new web articles were generated using AI in some form, compared to just 5% before the launch of ChatGPT. A post from Ask Perplexity on
The Wikimedia Foundation said fewer visits to Wikipedia could mean fewer volunteers expanding and enriching its content, and fewer individual donors supporting the work. The foundation is responding by enforcing third-party access policies, developing an attribution framework, 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 after its creation. The question is whether the platforms that use this knowledge will support the ecosystem that creates this knowledge.
The Wikipedia Foundation did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Declutter.
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