Wikipedia blames ChatGPT for falling traffic

Is ChatGPT just Wikiped-AI?

After threatening to replace humans in many sectors, generative AI is now targeting online platforms as well. Wikipedia is seeing a sharp decline in traffic as online users increasingly turn to ChatGPT and Google AI overviews to get their info.

According to a new blog post by Marshall Miller of the Wikimedia Foundation, human page views are are down 8% these past few months “as compared to the same months in 2024.”

This troubling phenomenon came to light after Wikipedia’s bot detection systems seemed 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.”

Miller believes that the trend reflects “the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information, noting “search engines providing answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content.”

Throw in the fact that “younger generations are seeking information on social video platforms rather than the open web,” and it’s no wonder that internet users are increasingly bypassing the Wiki middleman.

To wit, an Adobe Express report conducted over the summer found that 77% of Americans who use ChatGPT treat it as a search engine while three in ten ChatGPT users trust it more than a search engine.

Despite the looming threat of AI, Miller doesn’t believe that the digital encyclopedia was going obsolete.

“Almost all large language models (LLMs) train on Wikipedia datasets, and search engines and social media platforms prioritize its information to respond to questions from their users,” he wrote. “That means that people are reading the knowledge created by Wikimedia volunteers all over the internet, even if they don’t visit wikipedia.org.”

To help users get their info straight from the source, Wikipedia even experimented with AI summaries like Google, but put the kibosh on the movement after editors complained, Techcrunch reported.

Nonetheless, Miller expressed concern that the AI takeover would make it difficult to know where information is coming from. “With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work,” he fretted.

Wikipedia is not the only platform’s whose eyeballs have been impacted by generative AI.

In a statement to the Competition and Markets Authority in July, DMG Media, owner of MailOnline, claimed that AI Overviews had caused click-through rates for their site to plummet by 89 percent.

This comes amid a spike in AI slop — low quality and misleading content that’s auto-generated by artificial intelligence — that’s impacting every sector from academia to law.

In May, California judge slapped two law firms with a $31,000 fine after finding that they’d included AI slop in a legal brief sans any due diligence.