Wikipedia has suffered a significant drop in human visitors to its website as a result of people turning to artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews for information.
The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia, said traffic was down 8 per cent year-on-year as a result of search engines using generative AI to provide answers directly “rather than linking to sites like ours”.
The decline in human visitors to Wikipedia was only spotted after the Wikimedia Foundation updated the website’s bot detection systems.
“After making this revision, we are seeing declines in human pageviews on Wikipedia over the past few months, amounting to a decrease of roughly 8 per cent as compared to the same months in 2024,” Marshall Miller wrote in a blog post.
“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.”
Wikipedia is not the only site to experience reduced traffic as a result of generative AI, with many publishers complaining that tech firms are trawling through their content to provide answers without sending visitor to their sites.
In a statement to the Competition and Markets Authority in July, DMG Media, owner of MailOnline and Metro, said AI Overviews had seen click-through-rates drop by 89 per cent.
Rolling Stone’s parent company, Penske Media Corporation, filed a lawsuit against Google last month related to AI-generated summaries of its articles.
Google responded to such criticism in a blog post in August, claiming that it was committed to prioritising publishers in its AI search tools.
“Our data shows people are happier with the experience and are searching more than ever as they discover what Search can do,” wrote Liz Reid, head of Google Search.
“An AI response might provide the lay of the land, but people click to dive deeper and learn more, and when they do, these clicks are more valuable. While overall traffic to sites is relatively stable, the web is vast, and user trends are shifting traffic to different sites, resulting in decreased traffic to some sites and increased traffic to others.
“We continue to send billions of clicks to websites every day and believe that Search’s value exchange with the web remains strong.”
