Wikipedia’s human traffic is declining as more people rely on AI tools for answers.
The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, says that shifts in how people search for information online are cutting into its human traffic.
In a blog post published today, Marshall Miller, the foundation’s senior director of product, said Wikipedia’s human visits are down about 8% over the past few months compared to the same period in 2024.
The decline was revealed after the Foundation revised how it distinguishes between human and bot traffic, something it does to better understand real readership and enforce limits on how third-party bots scrape its data for commercial search and AI tools. The update came after Wikimedia noticed what looked like a spike in human traffic from Brazil, which turned out to be mostly bots.
“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,” Miller wrote.
