Wikipedia Reports Traffic Drop, Cites Impact of AI Search Summaries
San francisco, CA – October 20, 2025 – Wikipedia is experiencing a decline in human pageviews, attributing the drop to the increasing use of AI-powered search summaries, chatbots, and social media content. According to a new report from the Wikimedia Foundation, traffic to Wikipedia sites fell by 8% in 2024 compared to the previous year.
Wikimedia believes this decrease stems from the fact that its data is extensively used to train large language models (LLMs), yet these models don’t consistently link back to Wikipedia as a source. The foundation notes this trend isn’t isolated to Wikipedia, with other publishers also observing similar impacts.
The findings challenge previous statements from Google, which has denied that AI in search results reduces traffic to websites,despite reporting that Google AI Overviews has over 2 billion monthly users.
The core issue, Wikimedia explains, is that users satisfied by AI-generated responses are less likely to visit the original source material.”When a user finds what they want from an AI, they don’t visit the source, or continue with that session,” the report indicates.
Wikipedia itself briefly experimented with AI-generated summaries in June, but faced criticism from its editors, who deemed the practise unethical, as reported by TechCrunch.
While acknowledging the convenience of AI search for tasks like shopping and product details gathering, the report also raises concerns about the quality and accuracy of AI-generated content. The author notes that AI summaries can be based on ”low-effort posts, inaccurate content, fabricated posts on social media,” and warns against blindly accepting AI outputs, referring to inaccuracies as “hallucinations” – a term they find misleading, as AI models simply reproduce information from their training data.
Wikimedia is actively working to address the issue, launching new teams focused on reader growth and experience, and developing a framework for proper attribution to source websites. The foundation is encouraging AI users to visit the original source material to ensure accuracy and support content creators.
