Wikipedia’s page views have declined 8 percent over the past year as artificial intelligence tools increasingly answer user questions using the site’s content without directing traffic back to it, according to Wikimedia Foundation CEO Bernadette Meehan.
Meehan, who leads the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, told Axios the drop was not unexpected but still concerning. “It doesn’t mean that we’re sort of starry-eyed about it and not concerned,” she said.
AI chatbots and search tools rely heavily on Wikipedia’s vast archive of human-written articles to generate answers, but many of those systems now present information drawn from Wikipedia directly to users rather than linking them to the site. Meehan described Wikipedia as foundational to how these AI systems function, but said that role doesn’t guarantee the traffic and financial support the site needs to keep operating.
Wikimedia charges some large commercial users for reliable, high-volume access to its data. Publicly disclosed enterprise customers paying for that access include Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Perplexity. Combined, those payments account for 10 percent of Wikimedia’s operating expenses.
Notably, two of the industry’s largest AI developers, OpenAI and Anthropic, do not appear on Wikimedia’s public list of enterprise customers. Meehan told Axios that not all of the foundation’s agreements have been disclosed publicly, but she declined to name additional companies.
The stakes of the traffic decline go beyond advertising-style revenue concerns. Roughly 80 percent of Wikimedia’s operating budget comes from small individual donations, many of which are solicited through banners shown to people browsing the site. Fewer visitors means fewer opportunities to collect those donations.
Meehan also pointed to a longer-term risk: readers are often the pipeline through which new volunteer editors join Wikipedia. If fewer people are visiting the site directly, she said, the pool of future editors who maintain and expand its articles could shrink as well.
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