Wikipedia Traffic is Falling Due to AI

0:28Every dating app swipe is another loss. You're listening to a podcast right now, driving, working out, walking the dog. If you're into podcasts, chances are you have something to say too. With RSS.com, starting your own podcast is free and easy. Upload an episode and we distribute it to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and more. Track your listeners, see where they're from, and start earning from ads just like this. If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, this is your sign. Start your new podcast for free today at RSS.com. All right, Wikipedia is facing headwinds, partially due to AI, partially due to some politicization.

1:07There's a whole bunch of interesting stuff breaking down, and I think it impacts a lot of different businesses. Wikipedia is one of the most famous places for backlinks and for growing your business. SEO, this is something that, you know, working in marketing in my past, I spent an insane amount of time on. We're going to break down all of this, the whole situation and what we think it means for the future. Before we get into that, I wanted to mention that every single week, Jamie and I record a bonus episode that we don't post anywhere else. And we post it over on the AI Hustle School community.

1:40I think I got to go do an official count because I keep saying we have over 60 episodes because we've been doing this for over a year. But we got to be getting close to 100 episodes soon. So I'll let you guys know the exact number one of these days. But this week, we recorded an entire episode breaking down the new AI browser comment that Perplexia has put out. It used to be$200 a month. Now they've made it so anyone can actually go get access to this. And you're able to do some really interesting things. So we have a whole video breaking down me showing you how I'm actually using it for an actual use case, what it's capable of.

2:14So if you want to go check out that video or dozens of others where we're showing you how to grow and scale your businesses and your career using AI tools, We show, we break down the numbers. We don't show publicly anywhere else. So if you want to go check that out, go check out the Aya Hustle school community. There is a link in the description. All right, let's talk about Wikipedia. Jamie, give me your like overall vibe on the state of Wikipedia today. How often do you go and actually use that website? Yeah, unfortunately, I don't use it very much anymore. So I used to use a lot in my past, you know, for research and things like that.

2:49traffic to Wikipedia is down 8 % year over year. And I'm actually surprised it's not more, to be honest. But let's talk about... So Wikipedia originally has been recognized as a website of trust and authenticity. They always would ask you for money because they didn't have ads slopped all over the page. It was very just informative and research-based and fairly trustworthy. But now we have all these AI summaries, things coming out. And I'm guessing a lot of these have trained off Wikipedia, which is an extra stab in the back for them, I'm sure. But people just aren't going to Wikipedia anymore because they don't need to because they can get the answers in a faster way.

3:35So, I mean, it is kind of sad to see, but also we saw this coming. And like I said, I feel like it's surprising, actually, that traffic's not down even more. So Jane, when's the last time you've been to Wikipedia? I'm not going to lie. Since ChadGPT came out, I don't think I have been there once intentionally. Maybe I accidentally clicked a link that was cited in something and went there. One thing that I do think is interesting for me is going to school. Wikipedia was basically like a resource that I used a ton at school. I also do remember, and this is going to sound horrible, and I'm sure many people are screaming at me through their headphones once they hear this.

4:13when I was maybe like 14 years old, I went to a Wikipedia website. It was about some sort of battle. And I was like, I was like, wait, why is there an edit button on this? Because I think I'd made a Wikipedia account. I clicked the edit button and I went and changed like the number of troops that were fighting in this one particular battle. I removed a couple of zeros to see what, and I clicked save to see what happened. I went to the page and I kind of updated it. And I was like, what the heck? That's weird. But then I couldn't remember how many like soldiers were actually in the battle. I was like, oh no.

4:39And then I just closed the page and ran away and was Like crap, what have I done? Somewhere on the Wikipedia internet, if you were reading about a famous Canadian battle from the war of 1812, there may be a misrepresentation of how many troops were fighting in that battle. And I do apologize to the world for that. I'm trying to, you know, I gotta make up. I gotta make up for that some way. But I think that was like the first moment for me where I realized anyone could edit the website and it definitely removed a little bit of credibility from it when it was, when it, you know, you're like, wait a second.

5:09Hopefully some moderator could see in the comments that that number was changed to fix it. But I mean, there's definitely no guarantee on that. So I have no idea. Like you mentioned, it's fallen 8 % year over year. I think a lot of people that are listening to the podcast can relate that this is not a website we go to as much. You just go to ChatGPT, ChatGP could cite Wikipedia if it needed to. It can write it more concisely. It could look at more sources than just Wikipedia. And then I think at the same time, Wikipedia is probably seeing headwinds from like a lot of politicization of the platform.

5:40Elon Musk famously, Literally, I just went to X this morning and the top post was from Elon Musk. He's creating something called Grokipedia to compete with Wikipedia because he calls it Wokipedia. And one of the problems that I think, you know, whatever side politically you're on, I don't really care. I'll just give you like basically what's on the landscape right here is a lot of people on the right feel like Wikipedia has been, you know, taken over by activists, basically. That's like the quote I hear from a lot. And I think two weeks ago, Tucker Carlson did an interview with one of the founders of Wikipedia.

6:18So you may, if you're not politically right, you may hate Tucker Carlson or whatever, but he was interviewing one of the founders of Wikipedia. So I feel like that gives a little credibility to it. And they were saying like basically the same thing. Now, the one thing I think that's in particular is interesting is there is a list of websites that can and cannot be quoted in Wikipedia articles. And, you know, I think that the sites are kind of are pretty shocking. I might actually go find a list of sites so I can read it to you and you can decide whether that's balanced or unbalanced. But regardless, that is the sentiment to half of the population in America.

6:56So as we see AI kind of proliferate, and then I think probably politically, a lot of people are moving away from it for those reasons. And so because of that, I think it's facing a lot of headwinds to grow. So yeah, I don't know. That's my spiel on it. But Jamie, do you think that there's a way for them to recover? I don't know. So like, I guess as we were talking about this, my, my thoughts were, you know, what about Reddit? You know, has Reddit also seen a decline? Because a lot of AI summaries even pull from Reddit and source Reddit in their research. But then I was like, well, wait, wouldn't a site like Wikipedia actually have increased traffic from like AI bots essentially crawling the information?

7:36Or does a, does a, like when AI is training, does it just hit a site once and then collect all that info? and does it not need to go back? For example, does OpenAI reference a page once and then not have to reference it again? Or how does that work on the back end, do you think? Come again? So I would think traffic would be up on some of these sites just from AI bots crawling the pages, but it's not. Why do you think that is? That's really interesting because a report came out, I believe, like six months ago where Wikipedia said traffic was, or I think they said 30 % of their traffic was AI bots crawling the platform.

8:15And they, you know, they're like, we're trying to fight back about it, yada, yada. And so I think that's a really good point. This 8 % year over year is just the human page views that have been falling. So technically, if you looked at their traffic, it's probably up. but okay a lot of it's AI and the AI is I mean it's basically taking information from them but like it's also interesting though because I think it got a lot of bad press about it um in in a sense that you know they're they're kind of mad about the box but it's like if I'm like let's say I'm on the comet browser for example which we recently did our whole episode on the school community for and I say like hey go research um you know these five topics give me some information and if the comment browsers going to wikipedia and looking for the information then it's consolidating it writing it down and giving it back to me they would call that well that's just like a bot looking at our website this isn't bad and like some websites are trying to find ways to like block that but it's like well like i don't want to manually do that but i want the information it's on your website but it's hard for wikipedia in particular i don't think it's a big deal because they don't have advertising but for a lot of websites that have ads they're like well we don't want to show ads to bots because those aren't useful um so it's a really interesting tricky situation i think we we see this with wikipedia but this is this plays out across the entire internet i think basically um google tries to paint a really rosy picture of this where they're like they're like no um you know google search traffic isn't falling since we've done gemini we see people are doing more searches because you do like five follow-up searches and so they count all those follow-ups and then they make it so they're like yeah like people do like searches are up but i think overall like there's no way to there's no way around the fact that ChatGPT has 800 million weekly active users and those users are not going to Wikipedia or to Google or to a lot of other places for their information.

10:06They're just getting it all from ChatGPT now. Right. Yeah, totally. And that's, yeah, that's why I wonder about Reddit too, because I would imagine they're down with their human hits as well. Like I don't go on Reddit much anymore anyways, because the AI summary usually references and pulls data from that. So, yeah. Yeah. So I do think it's interesting. And then getting back to that tweet, which I'll get away from, Elon Musk recently has said that he's going to create something called Grokipedia, which is basically going to be Wikipedia, but using his AI chatbot Grok to come up with the articles.

10:40I don't think this is a horrible idea. I don't think Elon Musk and Grok have to necessarily do this. And I'm not like a particular Grok fan. I used to be a huge Grok fan. kind of stopped using it once elon added all his weird anime uh girl bots into it but um yeah it's just yeah but i mean now chat gpt is doing going to be doing the same thing sam altman said something like that so i'm like ah geez i'll probably go over to anthropics clod i'm like you know whatever so what's interesting though is i do think this is a very good use case for ai creating some sort of like basically like a wikipedia or or some sort of like online forum tool that gives you summaries of different topics that are somewhat solid that you can go to.

11:23I mean, great for SEO. I imagine you make a huge website. The problem with Wikipedia is when you have like humans going and moderating and editing, you have websites that have like massive battles. Some people are paid full time to go and quote unquote, defend Wikipedia, a Wikipedia page. Anytime someone goes and makes an edit to that Wikipedia page, they go and fix it. Now, this is typically, it sounds crazy, but this will typically happen, I think, for highly controversial pages. And Wikipedia has to actually lock down the edits on certain pages is really, is really, really interesting, really tricky.

11:56If you go look into it, I think like, I'm trying to think about it. I think it was like, maybe the Wikipedia page for Israel got a lot of like, quote unquote, trolls or like trying to edit it and, you know, say stuff bad about it. Maybe some of their founded, maybe some of them weren't, I don't, I'm not going to weigh in, but like people were paid full-time from the state of Israel and probably be paid full-time that don't like Israel to go and like have edit battles where they both just try to edit things on the page over and over again. I think the same thing probably happened for like World War II and Hitler and Nazi and like, like some of these really controversial pages, it is people's full-time job to edit and then defend the edits or whatever.

12:34It's crazy. So, um, all this to say, like there are downsides to that kind of human edited model that it feels like now an AI probably could do it. And whether it's OpenAI or Grok, I don't really care. But I think it may give a lot of people more trust if it was just like, this is just like the internet produced this content and it's not super like edited by people. I think people would appreciate that a little bit more. No, that makes a ton of sense. Yeah. So, well, hey, if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave us a rating or review wherever you're listening. We really appreciate those and they help us make more content like this.

13:10And also, please be sure to check out the AI Hustle School community if you haven't yet. We'd love to have you be a part of it to help grow and scale your business to the next level using AI. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time. John Daly here. You know what day it is? Neither do I. I live life daily. That's why I only spend on Moto Casino. Moto's got daily free bonuses, daily tournaments, new slots added daily. And the best part, guaranteed daily jackpots. You can't beat that. So today's the day you're gripping and spinning with me on Modo, America's Social Casino. Play for free on Modo.us.

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