Wikipedia sees decline in human pageviews, says AI is to blame

[harlan4096]

Wikipedia has revealed that it is seeing a decline in web traffic from human users. And the reason for it is, unsurprisingly, AI search.

An article posted by Wikimedia Foundation's Marshall Miller highlights how global trends have negatively impacted Wikipedia. The article says that Wikimedia Foundation's algorithms classify traffic from humans and bots. In May 2025, the foundation observed unusually high amounts of seemingly human traffic from Brazil. After investigating the matter, it updated its bot detection systems. Then the traffic data was reclassified for March to August 2025. It appears that a lot of the traffic was actually bots that were designed to evade detection.

The analysis reveals that Wikipedia saw a drop in human user traffic of around 8%, for the same duration, compared to 2024. Wikimedia believes that this decline is due to the bots, which are due to generative AI summaries on search engines, chatbots and social media. It says that Wikipedia's data sets are used to train almost all large language models (LLMs), but they may not always link to its sites. The report also notes that this behavior is not unique to Wikipedia, other platforms, publishers are observing the same.

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