Business and economy·January 15, 2026, 01:00

Wikipedia loses 8% of visits and wants AI companies to pay

AI-generated and checked against the sources listed below.

Wikipedia's human traffic has fallen 8 percent in a year, while bots from AI companies strain its servers. The Wikimedia Foundation wants AI companies to pay for access, and several large companies have already signed deals.

Fewer people are visiting Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs the large online encyclopedia, says traffic from real users has fallen by about 8 percent compared with the year before.

The foundation points to AI as part of the explanation. Chatbots and AI search often give the answer directly, so users do not need to click through to the source. At the same time, AI companies use enormous amounts of text from Wikipedia to train their language models. A language model is the program behind, for example, ChatGPT.

Bots strain the servers

The problem is not just fewer visits. Automated programs, so-called bots, fetch large amounts of content from Wikipedia. Sometimes they try to hide that they are bots. That strains the foundation's servers and costs money to run.

Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander has said the foundation's infrastructure is not free. She points out that it costs money to keep the servers running that both ordinary users and tech companies fetch data from.

Paid access instead of scraping

The foundation has asked AI companies to stop scraping the site for data and instead use the paid service Wikimedia Enterprise. There, companies get structured access to the content at scale, and the payment helps fund Wikipedia.

In January 2026, when Wikipedia turned 25, new deals were put in place. According to AP, Amazon, Meta, Perplexity, Microsoft and France's Mistral AI have joined. Google has had a deal since 2022, and the search engine Ecosia is also on board.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales says he is glad that AI models are trained on Wikipedia, because the content is written by humans. But according to him, the companies should pay their fair share of the costs they create.

What does it mean for you?

Wikipedia is run by volunteers and donations. If fewer people visit the site, it may become harder to attract both writers and money. The deals are meant to ensure that the companies that make money from the content help keep it alive. The AI answers you get today also rely heavily on Wikipedia's texts.