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The parent company of iconic online encyclopaedia Wikipedia has said that Google’s AI services, like AI Overviews, are hurting website traffic.
The Wikimedia Foundation said it detected an 8 per cent year-on-year decrease in real human traffic between March and August 2025.
“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,” Marshall Miller, senior director of product at Wikimedia Foundation, said.
Miller specifically took issue with webpage crawling bots that collect information for AI Overviews, such as the ones on the Bing and Google search engines.
While websites do what they can to prevent these bots from gaining access to scrape data, Miller said that after Wikipedia reclassified its traffic data, it still “found that much of the unusually high traffic for the period of May and June was coming from bots built to evade detection”.
“Many bots that scrape websites like ours are continually getting more sophisticated and trying to appear human,” Miller said.
Miller added that Wikipedia is of particular interest to AI and large language models (LLMs), with pretty much all relying on Wikipedia datasets for training.
“Almost all large language models (LLMs) train on Wikipedia datasets, and search engines and social media platforms prioritise its information to respond to questions from their users.
“That means that people are reading the knowledge created by Wikimedia volunteers all over the internet, even if they don’t visit wikipedia.org – this human-created knowledge has become even more important to the spread of reliable information online,” he said.
However, being a free online encyclopaedia, the lack of traffic reduces revenue and threatens the website’s existence.
Because of this, Wikimedia has requested that its users rely on information beyond AI Overviews, by clicking through to the original source material.
Last week, Google’s AI Overviews came under fire from Italy’s publishing trade association for allegedly stealing traffic from publications.
The Italian federation of newspaper publishers, FIEG, revealed that it had submitted a formal complaint to the Italian communications watchdog, Agcom.
“Google is becoming a traffic killer,” FIEG said in a statement.
The trade association argues that the AI overview “reduces [the publications’] visibility and discoverability, and thus their advertising revenues”.
“This has serious consequences for the economic sustainability and diversity of the media, with all the risks associated with a lack of transparency and the proliferation of disinformation in democratic debate,” it said.
The concern is that AI Overviews, which provide a summary of information based on searches, draw traffic away from the publications they source their info from, reducing traffic and ad revenue for news publications and creators.
The FIEG also found issue with Google’s new AI Mode, which allows users to speak directly to a chatbot for information.
“[Google’s AI services] violate fundamental provisions of the Digital Services Act, with detrimental effects on Italian users, consumers and businesses,” the statement said.
The FIEG’s complaint is just one of many in the EU. The European Newspaper Publishers’ Association is coordinating the complaints in an effort to force the European Commission to investigate Google for a breach of the EU Digital Services Act.
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