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Wikipedia has seen a decline in the number of users this year due to… artificial intelligence Summaries in search engine results. The growing popularity of social media is also contributing to declining traffic, according to Marshall Miller of the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that oversees the free online encyclopedia.
in this postMiller describes an 8% drop in human page views over the past few months compared to the numbers Wikipedia saw in the same months of 2024.
“We believe these declines reflect the impact of artificial intelligence and social media on how people seek information, especially with search engines providing direct answers to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content,” Miller wrote.
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Blame the robots
The AI-generated summaries that appear on search engines like Bing and Google often use robots called web crawlers to collect much of the information users read at the top of search results.
Websites do their best to restrict how these bots handle their data, but web crawlers have become adept at not being detected.
“Many of the bots that scrape websites like ours are constantly becoming more sophisticated and trying to appear human,” Miller wrote.
After reclassifying Wikipedia’s traffic data earlier this year, Miller says the site “found that much of the unusually high traffic during May and June was coming from bots designed to avoid detection.”
The Wikipedia blog post also noted that younger generations are turning to social video platforms for information rather than the open web and sites like Wikipedia.
Jerry MurrayBrands, publishers and creators must be willing to rethink their approach to adapting to AI, says the research director at IDC, a market data provider.
“The new reality is that conversational AI does not refer users to websites,” Murray said. “It is up to the publishing industry to find new ways to protect and monetize their content.”
When people search using AI, they are less likely to click
There is now promising research on the impact of generative AI on the Internet, especially with regard to online publishers who have business models that rely on users visiting their web pages.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that it infringed Ziff Davis’s copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
In July, Pew Research examined browsing data from 900 US adults and found that AI-generated summaries at the top of Google search results influenced AI-generated data. Web traffic. When the abstract appeared in a search, users were less likely to click on the links compared to when search results did not include abstracts.
Google search is especially important, because google.com It is the most visited website in the world – it is how most of us find what we are looking for on the Internet.
“LLMs, AI-based chatbots, search engines, and social platforms that use Wikipedia content should encourage more Wikipedia visitors, so that the free knowledge that so many people and platforms rely on can continue to flow sustainably,” Miller wrote. “With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may be growing and enriching the content, and fewer individual donors may be supporting this work.”
Last year, CNET published Extensive reporting About how changes in Google’s search algorithm impact web traffic for online publishers.
