The Wikimedia Foundation says human pageviews on Wikipedia have fallen roughly 8% compared with the same months of 2024, a decline it attributes to generative AI and social video. In a blog post published Friday, Marshall Miller of the foundation wrote that the drop became visible after an update to the site’s bot-detection systems, which revealed that much of an unusually high traffic spike in May and June came from bots designed to evade detection. The foundation reclassified data from March through August 2025 as a result.

Miller pointed to search engines that increasingly answer queries directly using Wikipedia content, and to younger users who seek information on social video platforms instead of the open web. He argued that Wikipedia’s knowledge still reaches people through those surfaces, but warned that “with fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.” The foundation is developing an attribution framework and has two new reader teams, while its Future Audiences project experiments with YouTube, TikTok, Roblox and Instagram. Google has disputed the claim that AI summaries reduce search traffic.