Wikipedia has seen a decline in users this year due to artificial intelligence summaries in search engine results and the growing popularity of social media, according to a blog post Friday from Marshall Miller of the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that oversees the free online encyclopedia.
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In the post, Miller describes an 8% drop in human pageviews over the last few months compared with the numbers Wikipedia saw in the same months in 2024.
"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," Miller wrote.
Blame the bots
AI-generated summaries that pop up on search engines like Bing and Google often use bots called web crawlers to gather much of the information that users read at the top of the search results.
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Websites do their best to restrict how these bots handle their data, but web crawlers have become pretty skilled at going undetected.
"Many bots that scrape websites like ours are continually getting more sophisticated and trying to appear human," Miller wrote.
After reclassifying Wikipedia traffic data from earlier this year, Miller says the site "found that much of the unusually high traffic for the period of May and June was coming from bots built to evade detection."
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