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

Wikipedia is often described as the last good website on a web increasingly filled with toxic social media and artificial intelligence. But it appears the online encyclopedia isn’t entirely immune to broader trends, with human page views down 8% year-on-year, according to a new blog from Marshall Miller of the Wikimedia Foundation.

The organization works to distinguish between traffic from humans and bots, and Miller wrote that the decline “over the past few months” was revealed after an update to Wikipedia’s bot detection systems showed that “most of the unusually high traffic during May and June was coming from bots that were designed to avoid detection.”

Why is traffic declining? Miller points to “the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information,” especially since “search engines are increasingly using generative AI to provide direct answers to searchers rather than linking to sites like ours” and because “younger generations are searching for information on social video platforms rather than the open web.” (Google has disputed the claim that AI summaries reduce traffic from search.)

Miller says the foundation welcomes “new ways for people to gain knowledge,” and he says that doesn’t make Wikipedia any less important, because knowledge from the encyclopedia still reaches people even if they don’t visit the site. Wikipedia even experimented with its own AI summaries, though it paused those efforts after editors complained.

But this shift carries risks, especially if people become less aware of the actual source of their information. As Miller says: “With fewer visits to Wikipedia, there may be fewer volunteers growing and enriching the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.” (Some of these volunteers are really cool, as they reportedly disarmed a gunman at the Wikipedia Editors’ Conference on Friday.)

For this reason, he believes that artificial intelligence, search and social media companies that use content from Wikipedia “should encourage more visitors” to the site itself.

He says Wikipedia is taking steps of its own, for example by 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 people you know about the importance of trusted, human-curated knowledge, and help them understand that the core content of generative AI is created by real people and deserves their support.”