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Wikipedia losing traffic to AI [1]

['Rob Beschizza']

Date: 2025-10-17  

Machine learning is being used to replace search engine results with summaries, and the sites being plagiarized soon noted a decline in traffic. Now Wikipedia observes a similar loss of pageviews, with its online encyclopedia down 8% since last year. The story is more complicated than chatbots intercepting visitors, though, as the site is a key target of bots.

Every month, Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects receive billions of pageviews from around the world. As this traffic comes in, the Wikimedia Foundation's algorithms classify it as coming from either humans or bots. This allows us to have an accurate understanding of the level of human traffic, and helps us enforce restrictions on how third-party bots pull in data to power commercial search and AI experiences. Many bots that scrape websites like ours are continually getting more sophisticated, and trying to appear human. To keep our metrics as accurate as possible, we continually update the ways we classify traffic.

Around May 2025, we began observing unusually high amounts of apparently human traffic, mostly originating from Brazil. This led us to investigate and update our bot detection systems. We then used the new logic to reclassify our traffic data for March-August 2025, and found that much of the unusually high traffic for the period of May and June was coming from bots that were built to evade detection.

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