Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search listings and social video

Wikipedia is often described as the last good website on an internet increasingly filled with toxic social media and AI slop. But it seems the online encyclopedia isn’t completely immune to broader trends, with human page views falling 8% year-over-year, according to a new blog post from Marshall Miller of the Wikimedia Foundation.

The foundation is working to distinguish between traffic from humans and bots, and Miller writes that the decline “over the past few months” was revealed after an update to Wikipedia’s bot detection systems appeared to show that “much of the unusually high traffic in the period of May and June came from bots that were built to avoid detection.”

Why is traffic falling? Miller points to “the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information,” particularly as “search engines increasingly use generative AI to provide answers directly to searchers instead of linking to sites like ours” and as “younger generations seek information on social video platforms instead of the open web.” (Google has disputed the claim that AI resumes reduce traffic from search.)

Miller says the foundation welcomes “new ways for people to get knowledge” and argues that this doesn’t make Wikipedia any less important, since knowledge gleaned from the encyclopedia still reaches people even if they don’t visit the website. Wikipedia even experimented with its own AI summaries, though it paused the effort after editors complained.

But this shift carries risks, especially if people become less aware of where their information actually comes from. As Miller puts it: “With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers can grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors can support this work.” (Some of these volunteers are truly notable, reportedly disarming a gunman at a Wikipedia editors conference on Friday.)

For that reason, he argues that AI, search and social enterprises that use content from Wikipedia “need to encourage more visitors” to the site itself.

And he says Wikipedia is taking its own steps, such as developing a new framework for attributing content from the encyclopedia. The organization also has two teams tasked with helping Wikipedia reach new readers, and is looking for volunteers to help.

Miller also encourages readers to “support content integrity and content creation” more broadly.

“When searching for information online, look for citations and click through to the original source material,” he writes. “Talk to the people you know about the importance of reliable, human-curated knowledge and help them understand that the content behind generative AI was created by real people who deserve their support.”