""We believe that these declines reflect the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information, especially with search engines providing answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content," Miller wrote. Blame the bots 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."
""Many bots that scrape websites like ours are continually getting more sophisticated and trying to appear human," Miller wrote. After reclassifying Wikipedia traffic data from earlier this year, Miller says the site "found that much of the unusually high traffic for the period of May and June was coming from bots built to evade detection." The Wikipedia blog post also noted that younger generations are turning to social-video platforms for their information rather than the open web and such sites as Wikipedia."
Wikipedia experienced an 8% drop in human pageviews over recent months compared with the same months in 2024. Generative AI and social media have changed how people seek information; search engines now provide answers directly, often based on Wikipedia content, reducing clickthroughs. AI-generated summaries often rely on web crawlers that scrape websites to gather information for search-result answers. Many bots have become more sophisticated and try to appear human, inflating traffic and evading detection. Reclassified traffic showed much of unusually high May–June traffic originated from bots built to evade detection. Younger generations increasingly use social-video platforms instead of the open web. Research points to serious effects on publishers reliant on webpage visits.
Read at CNET
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