In short
- Human visits to Wikipedia fell 8% year-over-year, with Wikipedia attributing it to folks visiting AI summaries as a substitute of consulting Wikipedia.
- AI summaries and engines like google now reply questions outright, with practically 60% of Google queries ending in on-page responses powered by Wikipedia content material.
- Publishers name the pattern “existential,” accusing tech platforms of utilizing their work with out compensation.
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The Wikimedia Basis introduced this week that human visitors to Wikipedia fell roughly 8% between Could and August in comparison with the identical interval final 12 months. The decline got here into focus after the muse found that refined bots, primarily from Brazil, had been disguising themselves as human guests.
After updating its detection methods in Could, the muse reclassified visitors knowledge and located a lot of the unusually excessive visitors in Could and June got here from bots constructed to evade detection. The revised numbers revealed what many in publishing already knew: fewer folks go to Wikipedia immediately as a result of engines like google now present solutions on their very own pages.
“After making this revision, we’re seeing declines in human pageviews on Wikipedia over the previous few months, amounting to a lower of roughly 8% as in comparison with the identical months in 2024,” Marshall Miller, wrote. “We consider that these declines mirror the affect of generative AI and social media on how folks search data, particularly with engines like google offering solutions on to searchers, typically primarily based on Wikipedia content material.”
AI isn’t just killing Wikipedia. Knowledge from Pew Analysis confirmed median year-over-year referral visitors from Google Search to premium publishers has decreased virtually each week throughout Could and June 2025, with losses outpacing positive factors two-to-one. Practically 60% of all Google searches find yourself in an AI abstract as a substitute of selling the studying of the particular supply.
Publishers throughout industries are sounding alarms and resorting to lawsuits to get some safety. Danielle Coffey, who leads the Information/Media Alliance representing greater than 2,000 shops, stated Google is utilizing writer content material with out compensation whereas providing no significant approach to choose out with out disappearing from search completely.
“It is parasitic, it is unsustainable, and it poses an actual existential risk to many in our business,” she stated.
The amount of AI content material on-line is rising quick. Analysis from search engine optimisation agency Graphite discovered that as of November 2024, virtually half of latest internet articles have been generated utilizing AI in some type, up from simply 5% earlier than ChatGPT’s launch. A submit by Ask Perplexity on X claimed AI content material went from round 5% in 2020 to 48% by Could 2025, with projections saying 90% or extra by subsequent 12 months.
The Wikimedia Basis stated fewer visits to Wikipedia might imply that fewer volunteers develop and enrich the content material, and fewer particular person donors assist the work. The inspiration is responding by imposing insurance policies for third-party entry, growing a framework for attribution, and experimenting with methods to carry free data to youthful audiences on platforms like YouTube and TikTok.
The inspiration stated Wikipedia’s human data is extra worthwhile to the world than ever earlier than, 25 years since its creation. The query is whether or not the platforms utilizing that data will assist the ecosystem that creates it.
The Wikipedia Basis didn’t instantly reply to a request for feedback by Decrypt.
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