Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, says changes in the way people search for information online are affecting human traffic.
In one Blog post In the study released today, Marshall Miller, the foundation’s senior director of product, said human visits to Wikipedia have declined about 8% in recent months compared to the same period in 2024.
The decline came to light after the foundation revised its distinction between human and bot traffic. This is done to better understand the actual readership and enforce restrictions on how third-party bots mine their data for commercial search and AI tools. The update came after Wikimedia noticed an apparent increase 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 the way people search for information, particularly as search engines deliver answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content,” Miller wrote.
He wrote that the decline wasn’t exactly a surprise. Search engines are increasingly using AI to display answers directly on results pages instead of linking to external sites like Wikipedia. At the same time, younger users are turning to platforms such as YouTube and TikTok to search for information.
Unfortunately, these shifts could have a negative impact on 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 the nonprofit running could also decline.
The situation is ironic, Miller noted, since almost all large language models (LLMS) rely on Wikipedia’s datasets for training. But in doing so, they may be damaging one of their most trusted sources of reliable information. That’s why Wikimedia is pushing LLMs, AI chatbots, search engines and social platforms that leverage Wikipedia content to drive more traffic back to the site.
To combat the problem, the nonprofit said it is working to ensure that third parties can responsibly and widely access and reuse Wikipedia content by enforcing its policies and developing clearer attribution standards. It is also experimenting with new ways to reach younger audiences on platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, Roblox and Instagram via videos, games and chatbots.
Wikimedia itself is not against AI. The foundation just launched it this month Wikidata projectsa new resource that converts around 120 million open data points in Wikidata into a format that is easier to use for large language models. The goal is to give AI systems access to free, higher quality data and improve the accuracy of their answers.
