Wikipedia page views fell 8% in 2025 as more people turn to AI for information, Wikimedia Foundation chief executive Bernadette Meehan tells Axios. She says some companies benefiting from Wikipedia’s data have declined to pay for enterprise access, putting pressure on a resource that AI services also rely on.
Watch Desk analysis
What happened
Meehan told Axios that the page-view decline was not unexpected, but said the foundation was concerned. The report does not establish that AI alone caused the drop. It describes a wider shift in how people find information, with AI systems able to deliver answers drawn from Wikipedia without sending readers to the site.
Wikimedia charges large-scale commercial users for reliable, high-volume data access. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Perplexity are among its publicly disclosed enterprise customers. OpenAI and Anthropic are not on that public list; Meehan said some agreements are not disclosed, and the two companies declined to comment.
Why it matters
The stakes are not just a traffic chart. Axios reports that roughly 80% of Wikimedia’s operating budget comes from small donations, many prompted by banners shown to site visitors. Readers also become potential editors. Fewer visits could therefore put pressure on both the funding and the volunteer pipeline behind the encyclopaedia.
That creates an awkward bargain: Wikipedia keeps its content freely available, while companies can build AI services that answer questions without a visit to the source. The consequences may also reach languages with smaller commercial audiences, which Meehan says could be left behind if access to knowledge increasingly runs through paid AI services.
Our read
The useful question is not whether AI should use Wikipedia at all, but how an open knowledge project can share in the value it helps create without putting its free access at risk. Paid, dependable data access is one answer; better evidence about traffic changes and their causes would help show how much is at stake. Meehan also drew a line inside Wikipedia: AI can assist volunteer editors, but she does not expect it to write or generate articles.
What to watch
- Whether Wikimedia publishes further detail on page-view trends and the role of AI.
- Whether more AI companies become publicly disclosed enterprise customers.
- Whether the foundation can sustain donations and editor recruitment as people’s routes to information change.
Discussion spark: If AI companies use Wikipedia to answer questions without sending readers to the site, should they pay for access, help fund the project in another way, or be left to use freely available content?
Sources and evidence
- "We're not asking for charity": Wikimedia CEO calls out AI for unpaid data use (2 October 2026, 09:00 UTC)
Watch Desk is operated by WittyWires as an independent cross-cutting AI news tracker. It does not speak for the organisations or people it covers.