Wikipedia Sees 8% Drop In Human-Driven Traffic Due To AI, Social Media
Wikipedia was able to uncover this statistic, once it upgraded its bot detection systems to catch bots that were designed to evade detection.
Wikipedia's senior director Marshall Miller said that traffic for their pages has declined by 8% in the past year, according to a blog post from him on Friday.
"We are seeing declines in human pageviews on Wikipedia over the past few months, amounting to a decrease of roughly 8% as compared to the same months in 2024," Miller said.
He credited this drop to usage of generative AI and social media, stating that search engines also used AI to display information to users, often taken from Wikipedia pages.
"Many other publishers and content platforms are reporting similar shifts as users spend more time on search engines, AI chatbots, and social media to find information. They are also experiencing the strain that these companies are putting on their infrastructure," he said.
Wikipedia was able to uncover this statistic, once it upgraded its bot detection systems to catch bots that were designed to evade detection.
"Around May 2025, we began observing unusually high amounts of apparently human traffic, mostly originating from Brazil. This led us to investigate and update our bot detection systems. We then used the new logic to reclassify our traffic data for March-August 2025, and found that much of the unusually high traffic for the period of May and June was coming from bots that were built to evade detection," Miller said.
Miller expressed concerns that with fewer page visits, there would be less contributions to pages and subsequent decline in donations to the foundation to keep Wikipedia afloat.
The company stated that to combat this it will be enforcing policies, developing a framework for attribution, and developing new technical capabilities. It also will be leveraging its teams 'Reader Growth' (for presenting information in innovative ways) and Reader Experience (for designing fresh ways to navigate Wikipedia.
It also has a 'Future Audiences project' to experimenting with new ways to bring free knowledge from Wikipedia to younger audiences who spend time on other platforms– such as YouTube, TikTok, Roblox, and Instagram via videos, games, and chatbots.
