Even Wikipedia can’t save you from a drop in visits due to AI

Not even Wikipedia you are protected from the negative impact of chatbots and other generative artificial intelligence functions on web traffic. The Free Encyclopedia reported that The number of human visits has dropped significantly in recent months.becoming 8% lower in interannual comparison.

The decline in global traffic from real people visiting Wikipedia is a response, at least in part, to the popularization of tools that offer information directly to users rather than links to access that data. For example, AI summaries from search engines like Google and chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini. As well as younger audiences searching for information on social networks and video platforms.

However, the most noticeable changes are related to artificial intelligence platforms. Those responsible for Wikipedia noticed something due to the increase in visits generated by bots rather than human internet users.

The Wikimedia Foundation has its own methods for detecting and classifying Wikipedia traffic based on whether it is real people or bots. However, recently we have started to see significant improvements in the development of bots that try to copy the behavior of human visitors in order to remain undetected.

In fact, the leaders of the Free Encyclopedia realized this thanks to a certain event. Here’s how Marshall Miller, the organization’s chief product officer, explained it:

“Around May 2025, we began to see unusually large amounts of what appeared to be human traffic, mostly from Brazil. This prompted us to investigate and update our bot detection systems. We subsequently used new logic to reclassify our traffic data from March to August 2025 and found that much of the unusually high traffic between May and June came from bots designed to evade detection.”

Having updated the bot’s parameters, they came to the conclusion that since April of this year, the number of visits to Wikipedia by people fell 8% year on year. Thus, visiting all versions of the encyclopedia has become noticeably beneficial. below 15,000 million monthlywhen they have remained consistently around this figure since at least September 2021.

AI is negatively impacting people’s visits to Wikipedia

The paradox is that the vast majority of generative AI tools that process or offer information They feed on Wikipedia for their results.. The Wikimedia Foundation emphasizes that this once again confirms the work of the volunteers who write and edit articles in the Free Encyclopedia. After all, the information they share still reaches millions of people every day.

But the organization believes that companies creating language models and applications that use Wikipedia will have to do more to encourage users to continue logging into the platform.

“With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers will be able to expand and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors will be able to support this work. “Wikipedia is the only site of its size with standards of verifiability, neutrality and transparency that disseminate information online, and it remains important to people’s everyday information needs in invisible ways,” Miller said.

Complaints about the impact of chatbots and other artificial intelligence tools on web traffic are not new. Cloudflare CEO said Google’s AI summaries are killing views on pages where original content is created. Mountain View denies this and says the number of “quality clicks” has increased.

However, a Pew Research Center study showed that in the US. Only 1% of people clicked on links in Google AI reports. Meanwhile, only 8% searched for a regular link if their search results included an AI review. A panorama that is starting to affect Wikipedia traffic.