Wikipedia complains about lost traffic to AI summaries

Wikipedia has complained about losing its human traffic to artificial intelligence summaries across search engines. In an announcement this week, the Wikipedia Foundation claimed that human traffic to Wikipedia dropped by 8% between May and August compared to the same period last year.

The drop became glaring after the platform discovered that sophisticated bots, primarily based in Brazil, had been disguising themselves as human visitors. After an update to its detection systems in May, the foundation reclassified traffic data and discovered that much of the unusually high traffic came from bots developed to evade detection. The revised number revealed that fewer people now visit Wikipedia because search engines now provide users with summaries.

Wikipedia complains about lost traffic to AI summaries

According to Marshall Miller, after the revisions were made, the foundation discovered a drastic decline in human page views on Wikipedia over the past few months, which has amounted to an 8% decrease compared to the same month in 2024. “We believe that these declines reflect the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information, especially with search engines providing answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content,” he said.

Wikipedia is not the only publishing outfit suffering from this AI-related issue. Data from Pew Research showed that median year-over-year referral traffic from Google Search to premium publishers reduced drastically every week during May and June, with losses outpacing gains two-to-one. According to the report, more than 60% of all Google searches end up in an AI summary instead of promoting the actual source of the information and pointing users towards it.

Publishers across industries have sounded alarms, with some resorting to lawsuits to get some sort of protection. Danielle Coffey, who is in charge of News/Media Alliance representing more than 2,000 outlets, mentioned that Google is using publisher content without any form of compensation. She also noted that the platform has offered no meaningful way to opt out without disappearing from searches entirely. “It’s parasitic, it’s unsustainable, and it poses a real existential threat to many in our industry,” she said.

AI-generated content predicted to rise by 2026

The same sentiment was echoed by Neil Vogel, CEO of People, after he accused Google of being a bad actor. Vogel stated that Google is not playing fair because it uses the same bot to crawl websites to index them for its search engine and support its AI features. “Google has one crawler, which means they use the same crawler for their search, where they still send us traffic, as they do for their AI products, where they steal our content,” said Vogel.

Meanwhile, the volume of AI content online is now on the rise. A research report from SEO firm Graphite discovered that as of November 2024, almost half of new web articles were generated using artificial intelligence in some form. The figure was up by 5% before ChatGPT was introduced. A post by Perplexity on X noted that AI content went from about 5% in 2020 to 48% by May 2025, with projections highlighting that the number could go as high as 90% by next year.

The Wikimedia Foundation claimed that fewer visits to Wikipedia could mean that fewer volunteers grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors support their work. The foundation mentioned that it is responding by enforcing policies for third-party access, developing a framework for attribution, and looking for ways to bring free knowledge to the younger generation on platforms like YouTube and TikTok. The foundation noted that Wikipedia’s human knowledge remains valuable to the world.

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