Wikipedia has seen a decline in the number of users this year artificial intelligence Summaries in search results. According to a blog post by Marshall Miller of the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that oversees the free online encyclopedia, the growing popularity of social media is also contributing to the decline in traffic.
IN the grantMiller describes an 8% drop in the number of human page visits in recent months compared to data recorded by Wikipedia during the same months in 2024.
“We believe these declines reflect the impact of generative AI and social media on how people search for information, particularly when search engines provide users with direct answers, often based on Wikipedia content,” Miller wrote.
It’s all the robots’ fault.
AI-generated summaries that appear on search engines like Bing and Google typically use robots called crawlers to collect much of the information that users read at the top of search results.
Websites do everything they can to limit how these robots process your data, but crawlers have developed the ability to act unnoticed.
“Many robots that explore sites like ours are becoming more sophisticated and trying to look human,” Miller wrote.
After reclassifying Wikipedia’s traffic data from earlier this year, Miller noted that the site “discovered that much of the unusually high traffic in May and June came from bots designed to avoid detection.”
Wikipedia’s blog post also notes that younger generations are turning to social video platforms for information rather than the open web and sites like Wikipedia.
Jerry MurrayA research director at IDC, a provider of market data, says brands, publishers and advertisers must be prepared to rethink the way they adapt to AI.
“The new reality is that conversational AI is not driving users to websites,” says Murray. “It’s up to the publishing industry to find new ways to protect and monetize their content.”
When people search with AI, they are less likely to click
There is currently promising research on the impact of generative AI on the internet, particularly on online publishers whose business models depend on users visiting their sites.
In July, Pew Research examined browser data from 900 US adults and found that AI-generated summaries at the top of Google search results were affected. When the summary appeared in a search, users clicked on the links less often than when the search results did not contain a summary.
Searching on Google is especially important because google.com is the most visited website in the world – it’s how most of us find what we’re looking for on the Internet.
“LLMs, AI chatbots, search engines, and social platforms that use Wikipedia content must drive more traffic to Wikipedia so that the free knowledge that so many people and platforms depend on can continue to circulate sustainably,” Miller wrote. “With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers will be able to expand and enrich the content, and perhaps fewer individual donors will support this work.”