Wikipedia has suffered a significant drop in human visitors to its website as a result of people turning to artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews for information.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia , said traffic was down 8 per cent year-on-year as a result of search engines using generative AI to provide answers directly “rather than linking to sites like ours”.

The decline in human visitors to Wikipedia was only spotted after the Wikimedia Foundation updated the website’s bot detection systems.

“After making this revision, we are seeing declines in human pageviews on Wikipedia over the past few months, amounting to a decrease of roughly 8 per cent as compared to the same months in 2024,” Marshall Miller wrote in a blog po

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