AI information summaries eating away at Wikipedia reader base

29 October 2025

Just about every online publisher has experienced a decline in the number of people reading articles and information published on their websites. Search engines presently do such a good job of breaking down the main points of news reports, blog posts, and the like, that seekers of information are seldom reading the material at its source.

Online encyclopedia Wikipedia is no exception, and falls in visitors stand to threaten what is surely an invaluable resource, along with others such as Encyclopaedia Britannica.

What happens if we follow this shift in the way people obtain information to its absurd, yet logical, conclusion? If websites such as Wikipedia, Britannica, along with news sites, and many, many, others, are forced to close because no one visits them anymore, what is going to feed the search engine AI summaries we’ve become accustomed to?

In short, we’re going to see AI summaries eat the web, and then eat themselves. The onus here is on search engines, AKA answer engines, and whatever other services generate AI summaries, to use them more selectively, and wean information seekers off them.

Is that something anyone can see happening? No, I didn’t think so.