Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video

Image Credits:Nikolas Kokovlis / NurPhoto / Getty Images AI Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video Anthony Ha 12:00 PM PDT · October 18, 2025

Image Credits:Nikolas Kokovlis / NurPhoto / Getty Images

AI Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video Anthony Ha 12:00 PM PDT · October 18, 2025

AI Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video Anthony Ha 12:00 PM PDT · October 18, 2025

Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video

Anthony Ha 12:00 PM PDT · October 18, 2025

Wikipedia is often described as the last good website on an internet increasingly filled with toxic social media and AI slop. But it seems the online encyclopedia is not completely immune to broader trends, with human page views falling 8% year-over-year, according to a new blog post from Marshall Miller of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Why is traffic falling? Miller points to “the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information,” particularly as “search engines are increasingly using generative AI to provide answers directly to searchers rather than linking to sites like ours” and as “younger generations are seeking information on social video platforms rather than the open web.” (Google has disputed the claim that AI summaries reduce traffic from search.)

Miller says the foundation welcomes “new ways for people to gain knowledge” and argues this doesn’t make Wikipedia any less important, since knowledge sourced from the encyclopedia is still reaching people even if they don’t visit the website. Wikipedia even experimented with AI summaries of its own, though it paused the effort after editors complained.

But this shift does present risks, particularly if people are becoming less aware of where their information actually comes from. As Miller puts it, “With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.” (Some of those volunteers are truly remarkable, reportedly disarming a gunman at a Wikipedia editors’ conference on Friday.)

For that reason, he argues that AI, search, and social companies using content from Wikipedia “must encourage more visitors” to the website itself.

And he says Wikipedia is taking steps of its own — for example, by developing a new framework for attributing content from the encyclopedia. The organization also has two teams tasked with helping Wikipedia reach new readers, and it’s looking for volunteers to help.

Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025 REGISTER NOW

San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025 REGISTER NOW

Miller also encourages readers to “support content integrity and content creation” more broadly.

Topics AI, Media & Entertainment, Social, Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia

AI, Media & Entertainment, Social, Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia

Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025 REGISTER NOW

Anthony Ha is TechCrunch’s weekend editor. Previously, he worked as a tech reporter at Adweek, a senior editor at VentureBeat, a local government reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, and vice president of content at a VC firm. He lives in New York City.

The foundation works to distinguish between traffic from humans and bots, and Miller writes that the decline “over the past few months” was revealed after an update to Wikipedia’s bot-detection systems appeared to show that “much of the unusually high traffic for the period of May and June was coming from bots that were built to evade detection.”

San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025

Anthony Ha Anthony Ha is TechCrunch’s weekend editor. Previously, he worked as a tech reporter at Adweek, a senior editor at VentureBeat, a local government reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, and vice president of content at a VC firm. He lives in New York City. You can contact or verify outreach from Anthony by emailing anthony.ha@techcrunch.com. View Bio

Anthony Ha Anthony Ha is TechCrunch’s weekend editor. Previously, he worked as a tech reporter at Adweek, a senior editor at VentureBeat, a local government reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, and vice president of content at a VC firm. He lives in New York City. You can contact or verify outreach from Anthony by emailing anthony.ha@techcrunch.com. View Bio