The Wikimedia Foundation reported this week that human traffic to Wikipedia dropped roughly 8% between May and August compared to the same months in 2024. The decline became clear after the foundation found that sophisticated bots from Brazil had been disguising themselves as human visitors.
Bot Traffic Masks Real Decline
According to Yahoo News, the foundation updated its detection systems in May and reclassified traffic data. Much of the unusually high traffic in May and June came from bots built to evade detection. The revised numbers revealed that fewer people visit Wikipedia directly because search engines now provide answers on their own pages.
Marshall Miller from the foundation wrote that the declines reflect the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information. Search engines provide answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content.
Publishers Face Similar Losses
AI is not just killing Wikipedia. Data from Pew Research showed median year-over-year referral traffic from Google Search to premium publishers decreased almost every week during May and June 2025. Losses outpaced gains two to one. Nearly 60% of all Google searches end up in an AI summary instead of promoting the reading of the actual source.
Industry Responds With Lawsuits
Publishers across industries are sounding alarms and resorting to lawsuits to get protection. Danielle Coffey leads the News Media Alliance representing more than 2,000 outlets. She said Google is using publisher content without compensation while offering no meaningful way to opt out without disappearing from search entirely.
Research from SEO firm Graphite found that as of November 2024, almost half of new web articles were generated using AI in some form. This is up from just 5% before ChatGPT launched. A post by Ask Perplexity on X claimed AI content went from around 5% in 2020 to 48% by May 2025.
The Wikimedia Foundation said fewer visits to Wikipedia could mean fewer volunteers grow and enrich the content. Fewer individual donors may support the work. The foundation is responding by enforcing policies for third-party access and developing a framework for attribution. It is also experimenting with ways to bring free knowledge to younger audiences on platforms like YouTube and TikTok.
