Wikipedia Faces Visitor Decline Amid Rise of AI and Social Media

Wikipedia is losing visitors as artificial intelligence tools and social media platforms reshape how people search for information.
According to a report by the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia’s global traffic dropped by 8% year-over-year, marking one of the steepest declines in the project’s history.

Marshall Miller, a product lead at the Wikimedia Foundation, explained that part of the drop became visible after the platform upgraded its bot-detection system. The adjustment revealed that a large share of earlier traffic — especially during May and June — came from automated bots that bypassed security filters.

However, the broader trend goes beyond technical updates. The shift in how people consume knowledge is transforming the web itself. Search engines increasingly provide AI-generated summaries, meaning users get answers directly on Google, Bing, or ChatGPT without clicking through to the source. As a result, Wikipedia — once the first stop for factual information — is now often skipped altogether.

Recent data supports this shift. According to SimilarWeb, time spent on Wikipedia decreased by 12% in 2024, while AI-powered platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity saw traffic increases of more than 50%. Moreover, younger audiences increasingly prefer short video explainers on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts, rather than reading long-form articles.

Despite this, the Wikimedia Foundation emphasizes that the encyclopedic value of Wikipedia remains critical. Its articles continue to serve as training data for AI models and as references for millions of digital assistants. Yet, fewer visits may mean fewer active editors and reduced donations — both vital for the project’s sustainability.

The Foundation previously tested AI-based summaries on Wikipedia pages but paused the experiment after community backlash. Today, it’s developing new attribution tools and outreach initiatives to attract new readers. Miller called on companies using Wikipedia data to help redirect users to the source and reminded audiences that behind every AI-generated fact stands the unpaid labor of human editors who keep the internet’s knowledge credible.