It’s hard to imagine a world without Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that for a quarter of a century has stood as one of the most influential sites on the Internet. However, in recent months, the site’s foundation has been shaken by the rise of generative AI, with Wikipedia attributing an 8 percent drop in human visitors this year to an increase in AI-generated content.
“These changes are unexpected,” said Marshall Miller, senior product director at the Wikimedia Foundation, in a recent blog post. “Search engines are increasingly using artificial intelligence to provide answers directly to searchers rather than linking to sites like ours.”
Wikipedia first noted the decline after, logically, noting the unusually high number of apparently human visitors this spring. The platform first discovered that the Uptick was due to an operation on bots designed to avoid detection. The next update of its BOT acquisition programs revealed that the actual number of people’s cars in the past few months was 8 percent compared to the same period in 2024.
One of the forces at play is AI Overviews Fights, which was launched last year to provide AI-powered summaries above search results, drawing insights from across the Web. According to a Pew Research Center report, the share of users who are likely to click on traditional search results has shifted when the Google AI AI summary appears. Of the 900 US adults surveyed, only 1 percent clicked on the link to the revised AI summary itself. Google, however, maintains that its AI integration has done little to reduce the overall volume on linked websites.
Content from Wikipedia—alongside YouTube and Reddit—dominates not traditional Google results but new AI summaries. Together, the three websites accounted for 15 percent of AI content and 17 percent of traditional search content, according to Pews.
Wikipedia remains the primary target of large-scale big data language models (LLMS) that rely on large troves of online knowledge for training, often collected by bots that threaten the web. Almost all of LLMS trains on wikipedia datasets, according to Miller, who notes that Encyclopedia data is prioritized by search engines and social media platforms alike when generating Chatbot responses.
This means that even as site visits decrease, wikipedia content continues to be consumed. However, few visitors risk the Encyclopedia’s future, as the nonprofit relies on donations and volunteer editors to keep its extensive and up-to-date information.
How does Wikipedia use AI?
Wikipedia is not really anti-anti-in fact, Encyclopediakas have adopted AI to direct tedious tasks to their editors. Its AI tools help with workflows, giving volunteers more time for negotiation and deal-making, while also making automated versions of familiar topics and increasing referral rates for new donors.
To better manage the risks of AI, Wikipedia is now pursuing a range of new projects. This includes developing a framework for fighting content and making it easier for volunteers to organize from mobile devices, Miller said. The foundation is also experimenting with new ways to reach younger audiences on platforms like Tiktok and Roblox through mediums like videos, games and AI Chatbots.
“Twenty-five years since its creation, Wikipedia’s human knowledge is more important to the country than ever,” Miller said. “As we ask everyone to support our information platforms in old and new ways, we hope that Wikipedia will be here, to ensure that the Internet provides free, accurate, human information, for future generations.
