"Wikipedia has seen a decline in users this year due to artificial intelligence summaries in search engine results. The growing popularity of social media also contributes to the traffic decline, according to a blog post from Marshall Miller of the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that oversees the free online encyclopedia. In the post, Miller describes an 8% drop in human pageviews over the last few months compared with the numbers Wikipedia saw in the same months in 2024."
"AI-generated summaries that pop up on search engines like Bing and Google often use bots called web crawlers to gather much of the information that users read at the top of the search results. Websites do their best to restrict how these bots handle their data, but web crawlers have become skilled at going undetected. "Many bots that scrape websites like ours are continually getting more sophisticated and trying to appear human," Miller wrote."
Wikipedia experienced an 8% drop in human pageviews over recent months compared with the same months in 2024. Search engine AI-generated summaries increasingly provide answers directly to users, often based on Wikipedia content, reducing the need for clicks to encyclopedia pages. Web crawlers and scraping bots are gathering content for AI summaries and have become more sophisticated at evading detection, which also distorted earlier traffic metrics in May and June. Younger generations are turning to social-video platforms for information instead of the open web. Conversational AI often does not refer users to source websites, prompting publishers and creators to rethink distribution strategies.
Read at CNET
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