Wikipedia has seen a decline in users this year due to artificial intelligence summaries in search engine results. The growing popularity of social media also contributes to the traffic decline, according to a blog post from Marshall Miller of the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that oversees the free online encyclopedia.
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.
Don't miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.
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.
CNET
Websites do their best to restrict how these bots handle their data, but web crawlers have become 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."
... continue reading