Researchers from the University of Washington indicated that Wikipedia's audience has decreased following the launch of AI Overviews, a Google feature that generates summarized texts to answer user queries.
This study, which is still preliminary and has not undergone peer review, was reported by UOL Tilt and corroborates observations made by other research and by Wikipedia itself in recent years. The researchers examined Wikipedia's English traffic flow after the introduction of AI Overviews in the United States in May 2024, comparing this data with that of other languages of the free encyclopedia.
Significant reductions were recorded: the German version showed a drop of 5.45%, while the French version registered a reduction of 4.82%. It is estimated that this change represents a loss of about 100.27 million monthly visits.
AI Overviews are Google features that use artificial intelligence to create automatic answers based on web information, displaying the text at the top of the page along with links to the sources. In Brazil, this feature was launched in August 2024 under the name 'AI-generated overview.'
The authors themselves acknowledge limitations in the study, such as the estimate that only 40% of English Wikipedia traffic comes from the US, as well as the fact that access data encompasses all search engines. Google contested this latter point, alleging that the study does not isolate its own search engine, and researcher Hema Yoganarasimhan pointed out that competitors have a very small share of the total traffic.
The influence of generative AI on the reduction of site visits is not a new phenomenon. The Pew Research Center analyzed data from 900 adults in the United States who consented to share their browsing history. According to this research, when Google did not display an AI-generated summary, 15% of visits resulted in clicks; however, with the summary present, this rate dropped to 8%. Furthermore, the percentage of visits completed without clicking any link increased from 16% to 26% when the summary was active.
Regarding Wikipedia, the negative impact on traffic is not limited to Google. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and other institutions have identified that certain articles suffered steeper traffic drops than others, and the cause may be linked to ChatGPT. This work establishes a correlation between traffic numbers and the responses provided by the OpenAI chatbot: the more similar these responses are to the original article, the greater the impact, which could potentially decrease voluntary contributions to the content of these pages.
Wikipedia itself had already reported a drop in its traffic after the popularization of generative AI, registering an annual reduction of 8%, according to data released in October 2025. The foundation responsible for the encyclopedia also reported that access made by robots used in AI training accounts for 65% of the most costly traffic—that which requires extracting information not stored in cache but in data centers.
Although Wikipedia does not have advertising, which decouples its audience from commercial revenue, the study's authors suggest that this may reduce incentives for people to contribute to the free encyclopedia. Another factor mentioned is donations: a smaller number of visitors decreases the visibility of fundraising campaigns. Despite this, the research offers an overview of the future of the web; if this effect extends to other portals, the outcome could be severe, with a publication similar in volume to Wikipedia losing up to US$ 37 million (R$ 190 million) annually.
These types of impacts have motivated investigations into Google's AI Overviews. In Brazil, in April 2026, the Administrative Council for Economic Defense (Cade) initiated an investigation to verify whether the use of journalistic content in summaries affects the traffic and revenue of companies in the sector.