Wikipedia blames ChatGPT for low 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 overview and Google AI for their information.

According to a new blog post Marshall Miller from the Wikimedia Foundation, Human page views are down 8% over the past few months “compared to the same months in 2024.”

This troubling phenomenon came to light after Wikipedia’s bot detection systems showed that “most of the unusually high traffic during May and June was coming from bots that were designed to avoid detection.”

Miller believes this trend reflects “the influence of generative AI and social media on how people search for information,” noting that “search engines provide direct answers to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content.”

Considering the fact that “younger generations are searching for information on social video platforms rather than the open web”, it is not surprising that Internet users are increasingly avoiding the wiki medium.

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

Despite the looming threat of artificial intelligence, Miller doesn’t think the digital encyclopedia is outdated.

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

To help users get their information directly from the source, Wikipedia experimented with AI summaries like Google’s, but put the matter into practice after editors complained. TechCrunch reported.

However, Miller expressed concern that an AI takeover would make it difficult to know where information came from. “As traffic to Wikipedia declines, fewer volunteers may develop and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work,” he expressed concern.

Wikipedia is not the only platform affected by generative AI.

in statement To the Competition and Markets Authority in July, DMG Media, owner of MailOnline, claimed that AI Overviews had caused click-through rates to its site to fall by 89 percent.

This comes amid a sharp rise in AI — low-quality, misleading content automatically generated by artificial intelligence — that is impacting every sector from academia to law.

In May, a California judge slapped two law firms with a penalty A $31,000 fine after being found They included artificial intelligence in a legal brief without doing any due diligence.