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𝗪𝗶𝗸𝗶𝗽𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗮 𝘀𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗰 𝗶𝘀 𝗳𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗱𝘂𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗔𝗜 𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 𝘀𝘂𝗺𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝗼𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝘃𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗼

Wikipedia is often described as the last good website on an internet increasingly filled with toxic social media and AI slop. But it seems the online encyclopedia is not completely immune to broader trends, with human pageviews falling 8% year-over-year, according to a new blog post from Marshall Miller of the Wikimedia Foundation.

The foundation works to distinguish between traffic from humans and bots, and Miller writes that the decline “over the past few 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 of May and June was coming from bots that were built to evade detection.”

Why is traffic falling? Miller points to “the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information,” particularly as “search engines are increasingly using generative AI to provide answers directly to searchers rather than linking to sites like ours” and as “younger generations are seeking information on social video platforms rather than 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 gain knowledge” and argues this doesn’t make Wikipedia any less important, since knowledge sourced from the encyclopedia is still reaching people even if they don’t visit the website. Wikipedia even experimented with AI summaries of its own, though it paused the effort after editors complained.

Read More: https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/18/wikipedia-says-traffic-is-falling-due-to-ai-search-summaries-and-social-video/