Wikipedia Claims Human Page Views Down Because Bots Are Stealing Data

The Wikimedia Foundation, which is the organisation behind Wikipedia, has reported an 8% decline in human traffic to the online encyclopedia. The organisation has blamed generative AI tools like ChatGPT and search engines for diverting visitors and threatening its sustainability.

According to Marshall Miller, Senior Director of Product at Wikimedia, the decline is because of AI chatbots and search engines scraping Wikipedia's content and providing direct answers to users, which has apparently eliminated the need for them to visit the site.

In an official blog post, Miller wrote, "Bots and crawlers have continued to have a significant impact on traffic data to the Wikimedia projects."

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"Every month, Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects receive billions of pageviews from around the world. As this traffic comes in, the Wikimedia Foundation's algorithms classify it as coming from either humans or bots. This allows us to have an accurate understanding of the level of human traffic, and helps us enforce restrictions on how third-party bots pull in data to power commercial search and AI experiences. Many bots that scrape websites like ours are continually getting more sophisticated, and trying to appear human. To keep our metrics as accurate as possible, we continually update the ways we classify traffic," the post read.

The post further revealed that the organisation began observing unusually high amounts of apparently human traffic, mostly originating from Brazil, around May 2025.

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They launched a probe and updated their bot detection systems. "We then used the new logic to reclassify our traffic data for March-August 2025 and found that much of the unusually high traffic for the period of May and June was coming from bots that were built to evade detection," the post stated.

The trend is concerning for Wikipedia, as fewer visits mean fewer volunteer editors and donors. A decline in human input affects Wikipedia's future.

The Wikimedia Foundation has been urging platforms using Wikipedia's content to provide clear attribution and encourage users to visit the original source material.