Wikipedia has seen a decline in user numbers this year due to artificial intelligence summaries in search engine results and the growing popularity of social media, according to a blog post Friday by Marshall Miller of the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that oversees the free online encyclopedia.
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IN fastMiller describes an 8% decline in human page views over the past few months, compared to the numbers Wikipedia saw for the same months in 2024.
“We believe this decline reflects the influence of generative artificial intelligence and social media on how people search for information, especially as search engines provide answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content,” Miller wrote.
It's all the bots' fault
AI-generated summaries that appear on search engines like Bing and Google often use bots called web crawlers to collect much of the information users read at the top of search results.
Websites do their best to limit how these bots handle their data, but web crawlers have learned to remain undetected.
“Many of the bots that crawl sites like ours are constantly becoming more sophisticated and trying to look like humans,” Miller wrote.
After reclassifying Wikipedia traffic data from earlier this year, Miller says the site “found that much of the unusually high traffic between May and June came from bots designed to evade detection.”
The Wikipedia blog also notes that younger generations are turning to social video platforms for information rather than the open web and sites like Wikipedia.
When people search with AI, they are less likely to click on a link.
There is currently promising research into the impact of generative artificial intelligence on the Internet, especially for online publishers whose business models rely on users visiting their web pages.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET's parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April, alleging that it violated Ziff Davis' copyrights in the training and operation of its artificial intelligence systems.)
In July, Pew Research examined browsing data from 900 American adults and found that AI-generated summaries at the top of Google search results influenced web traffic. When the summary appeared in search results, users were less likely to click on the links compared to when the search results did not include summaries.
Google search is especially important because Google.com it 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 should encourage more visitors to Wikipedia so that the free knowledge that so many people and platforms depend on can continue to spread sustainably,” Miller wrote. “With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers will be able to develop and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors will be able to support this work.”
Last year CNET published extensive report on how changes to Google's search algorithm have destroyed web traffic for online publishers.
