Over at the official blog of the Wikipedia community, Marshall Miller untangled a recent mystery. “Around May 2025, we began observing unusually high amounts of apparently human traffic,” he wrote. Higher traffic would generally be good news for a volunteer-sourced platform that aspires to reach as many people as possible, but it would also be surprising: The rise of chatbots and the AI-ification of Google Search have left many big websites with fewer visitors . Maybe Wikipedia, like Reddit , is an exception?

Nope! It was just bots:

This [rise] led us to investigate and update our bot detection systems. We then used the new logic to reclassify our traffic data for March–August 2025, and found that much of the unusually high traffic for the period of May and June was coming from bot

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