Overview
- After updating detection tools, Wikimedia determined that most of the May–June 2025 traffic spike came from bots designed to mimic human behavior.
- The reanalysis covered March through August and found a large share of the additional automated requests originated from Brazil.
- Foundation data show human visits declined by about 8% versus the same months in 2024.
- Wikimedia says the bots scrape and store articles, frequently supplying training data for large language models in addition to conventional search crawlers.
- The foundation urges operators of LLMs, search engines, and social platforms to steer users to Wikipedia to sustain donations and volunteers, noting prior 2024 strain from AI-driven bandwidth spikes.