Wikimedia Foundation CEO Bernadette Meehan reports an 8% year-over-year decline in human page views on Wikipedia. The data, covering the period from March through August 2025 compared to 2024, was revealed following an upgrade to the organization's bot-detection systems.
The foundation identified that automated traffic had previously masked the downward trend by mimicking human behavior. Furthermore, bandwidth consumption for media downloads on Wikimedia projects has increased by 50% since January 2024, primarily due to AI scrapers and crawlers.
Historically, over 90% of Wikipedia traffic originated from Google search. However, the rise of AI-generated summaries in search results and chatbots has reduced the necessity for users to click through to the original site, impacting the platform's donation and volunteer recruitment funnels.
Meehan, who assumed the CEO role on January 20, 2026, advocates for AI developers to provide proper attribution and financial support to the ecosystem. The foundation continues to operate Wikimedia Enterprise, a commercial service that sells structured data feeds to large-scale users.
