The Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, has reported a significant decline in traffic to the online encyclopedia as more people access Wikipedia information through generative AI-powered chatbots, a move the foundation says is threatening the project’s survival.
The Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, has reported a significant decline in traffic to the online encyclopedia as more people access Wikipedia information through generative AI-powered chatbots, a move the foundation says is threatening the project’s survival.
«We welcome new ways to gain knowledge. However, AI-powered chatbots, search engines, and social platforms that use Wikipedia content should encourage more visitors to Wikipedia so that the free knowledge that so many people and platforms depend on can continue to spread sustainably,» the foundation’s senior director of product, Marshall Miller, wrote in a blog post.
He explained that as the number of visits to Wikipedia decreases, the number of volunteers who can develop and enrich its content will decrease, as will the number of donors who can support this work.
Wikipedia articles are some of the most common training data for artificial intelligence models, and Google and other platforms have used Wikipedia articles to populate their snippets and knowledge panels for years, which reduces traffic to Wikipedia itself, 404 Media points out.
«Almost all major language models are trained on Wikipedia datasets, and search engines and social media platforms prioritize its information to answer their users’ questions,» Miller said.
Miller said that in May 2025, Wikipedia noticed an unusually high amount of traffic that appeared to be human and originated mostly from Brazil. He did not go into detail, but explained that this prompted the Foundation to update its bot detection systems.
«After making these changes, we have seen a decline in the number of people viewing Wikipedia pages over the past few months, which is approximately 8% compared to the same months in 2024», he said.
In July, the Pew Research Center found that only 1% of Google searches resulted in users clicking on the link in the AI response from which the data was taken.
«This decline is not unexpected. Search engines are increasingly using generative artificial intelligence to provide answers directly to users, rather than linking to sites like ours», Miller said.
He said that young people are now often looking for information on social video platforms rather than the regular internet, and other platforms are noticing this. He added that the Foundation is also working to bring Wikipedia content to younger audiences through YouTube, TikTok, Roblox, and Instagram.
Miller also urged users to «choose online behavior that supports the integrity of content and content creation».
«When you search for information online, look for citations and go to the original source. Talk to your friends about the importance of reliable, human-curated knowledge and help them understand that the content that underpins generative AI was created by real people who deserve their support», he said.
Elon Musk previously announced that his company xAI is working on Grokipedia, an «open knowledge repository» that is intended to be better than Wikipedia and help xAI «understand the universe.»
