Add thelocalreport.in As A Trusted Source
People turning to Wikipedia has resulted in a sharp decline in the number of human visitors to its website artificial intelligence Tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overview for insights.
Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that hosts wikipediaSaid that traffic has declined 8 percent year-over-year as a result of search engines using generative aye “Instead of linking to sites like ours” to provide direct answers.
A decline in human visitors to Wikipedia was observed only after the Wikimedia Foundation updated the website’s bot detection system.
Marshall Miller wrote in an article, “After this revision, we are seeing a decline in human pageviews on Wikipedia over the past few months, a decline of about 8 percent compared to the same months in 2024.” blog post,
“We believe these declines reflect the impact of generative AI and social media on how people search for information, particularly as search engines provide answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content.”
Wikipedia is not the only site to experience reduced traffic as a result of generic AI, with several publishers complaining that tech companies are trawling through their content to provide answers without sending visitors to their sites.
In a statement In July the Competition and Markets Authority, owner of DMG Media, mailonline And Metrosaid AI overviews saw an 89 percent drop in click-through rates.
rolling stoneThe parent company of Penske Media Corporation, filed trial last month against Google over AI-generated summaries of its articles.
Google responded to such criticism in a way blog post In August, it claimed it was committed to prioritizing publishers in its AI search tools.
Liz Reed, head of Google Search, wrote, “Our data shows that people are happier with the experience and searching more than ever because they’ve discovered what search can do.”
“AI feedback can provide on-the-ground information, but people click to dig deeper and learn more, and when they do, these clicks are more valuable. While overall traffic to sites is relatively stable, the Web is vast, and user trends are shifting traffic to different sites, resulting in decreased traffic on some sites and increased traffic on others.
“We continue to send billions of clicks to websites every day and believe the value exchange of search with the Web remains strong.”