Wikipedia is often described as the last good website in an internet filled with toxic social media and artificial intelligence. However, it seems the online encyclopedia isn’t entirely immune to wider trends, with human page views down 8% year-on-year, according to a new blog post by Marshall Miller of the Wikimedia Foundation.
The foundation works to distinguish between human and bot traffic, and Miller writes that the decline “in recent months” was revealed after an update to Wikipedia’s bot detection systems appeared to show that “much of the unusually high traffic for the period May and June came from bots built to avoid detection.”
Why is traffic dropping? Miller notes “the impact of AI and social media on how people seek information,” particularly as “search engines increasingly use AI to provide answers directly to searchers instead of linking to sites like ours” and “younger generations are looking for information on social video platforms instead of the open web.” (Google has disputed the claim that AI summaries reduce traffic from search.)
Miller says the foundation welcomes “new ways for people to acquire knowledge,” and argues that this doesn’t make Wikipedia any less important, since the knowledge that comes from the encyclopedia still reaches people even if they don’t visit the site. Wikipedia even experimented with its own AI summaries, though it discontinued the effort after complaints from editors.
However, this shift carries risks, particularly if people become less aware of where their information comes from. As Miller puts it, “With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers can develop and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors can support this project.” (Some of these volunteers are truly remarkable, reportedly disarms a gunman at a Wikipedia editors conference on Friday.)
For this reason, he argues that AI, search and social media companies that use content from Wikipedia “need to encourage more visitors” to the site itself.
And he says Wikipedia is taking its own steps, for example by developing a new framework for rendering content from the encyclopedia. The organization also has two teams tasked with helping Wikipedia reach new readers and is looking for volunteers to help.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
|
27-29 October 2025
Miller also encourages readers to “support content integrity and content creation” more broadly.
“When looking for information online, look for citations and click on the original source material,” he writes. “Talk to the people you know about the importance of trusted, human-curated knowledge and help them understand that the content behind genetic AI is created by real people who deserve their support.”
