AI Is Killing Wikipedia’s Human Traffic

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that runs Wikipedia, says changes in how people search for information online are reducing its human traffic.

A Blog post Published today, Marshall Miller, the foundation’s senior director of products, said human visits to Wikipedia have fallen by about 8% in the past few months compared to the same period in 2024.

The decline was revealed after the foundation overhauled how it distinguishes between human and bot traffic, doing so to better understand real readers and to enforce restrictions on how third-party bots scrape its data for commercial search and AI tools. The update comes after Wikimedia noticed what appeared to be a spike in human traffic from Brazil, which turned out to be mostly bots.

“We believe these declines reflect the impact of generative AI and social media on how people find information, particularly as search engines provide direct answers to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content,” Miller wrote.

He wrote that the drop wasn’t exactly a surprise. Search engines are using AI to provide answers directly to results pages instead of linking to external sites like Wikipedia. At the same time, younger users are turning to platforms like YouTube and TikTok for information.

Unfortunately, these changes may have negative implications for Wikipedia. With fewer visits, Wikipedia’s volunteer base, the community that writes and edits its content, could shrink, Miller warned. And with less traffic, the individual donations that keep nonprofits running may also decline.

The situation is ironic, Miller points out, because almost all large language models (LLMS) rely on the Wikipedia dataset for training. Yet in doing so, they may be hitting one of their most trusted sources of reliable information. For this reason, Wikimedia is requesting LLMs, AI chatbots, search engines, and social platforms that use Wikipedia content to help drive more traffic to the site.

To address the issue, the nonprofit organization said it is working to ensure that third parties can access and reuse Wikipedia content responsibly and at scale by enforcing its policies and developing clearer attribution standards. It is also experimenting with new ways to reach younger audiences on platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Roblox and Instagram through videos, games and chatbots.

Wikimedia itself is not anti-AI. The foundation launched this month itself Wikidata projectA new resource that converts the roughly 120 million open data points on Wikidata into a format that’s easy to use for large language models. The goal is to give AI systems access to free, high-quality data and improve the accuracy of their answers.