There is a lot of discussion about what AI will disrupt. Can we see a time when jobs disappear?
The digital world is in flux. Lawsuits are flying as AI starts to reduce the revenues of particular sites. Most of this is flying at the companies (Big Tech) behind the AI models. Google is one company that finds itself in the crosshairs, accused of taking content and serving it up without reference to the original source.
It is a scene that is repeating itself on a weekly basis. With each passing month, we see the "old" internet dying, with a new one forming. The AI age is upon us and it will first dominate the digital world.
Wikipedia is one company that is finding out this reality. The leading source for information is seeing its numbers decline. While Elon Musk mentioned rolling out Grokipedia, this might end up being nothing more than a marketing (or branding) ploy. Google and other search engines are effectively doing this.
Let us take a look at this and the impact it could have.
The chart above shows some of what is happening to Wikipedia. Google is really putting a hurt on the traffic since it is providing information directly in the search.
According to studies, the result is an 8% decline in traffic.
“After making this revision, we are seeing declines in human pageviews on Wikipedia over the past few months, amounting to a decrease of roughly 8% as compared to the same months in 2024,” Marshall Miller, wrote. “We believe that these declines reflect the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information, especially with search engines providing answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content.”
This is not surprising. When people do a search, they are mostly seeking information. Unfortunately, the internet was set up based upon hyperlinks. That is what search ultimately provides: websites it thinks are most relevant to what is being sought.
Unfortunately, as most of us know, we tend not to want a website but the information (or service) it offers. When it comes to the former, Wikipedia was the main destination.
AI disrupts this due to the fact it provides the information within the search. This is spreading to other sites.
AI is not just killing Wikipedia. Data from Pew Research showed median year-over-year referral traffic from Google Search to premium publishers has decreased almost every week during May and June 2025, with losses outpacing gains two-to-one. Nearly 60% of all Google searches end up in an AI summary instead of promoting the reading of the actual source.
Companies (and individuals) are responding by heading to court. Lawsuits are being filed against these Big Tech, the ones mostly behind these models. The challenge is the fact that archaic laws are being applied. In the United States, the copyright laws do not address this issue.
Even if it did, the other issue is that stopping American companies, as an example, would do nothing to hinder the Chinese companies working on the same technology.
Elon Musk announced Grokipedia a few weeks ago. This is something that is going to destroy Wikipedia. That does not mean, however, that it will dominate the information space.
Wikipedia is slow and human-centric. It relies upon volunteers to update its information. There are editors who change entries, often based upon ideology. This is what got Musk upset.
That said, it is not politics that will destroy Wikipedia. The fact that it is slow is the reason. Grokipedia will use AI to update entries, pulling from the real time data entered into X.
Exclusivity does not exist within this realm. There is no reason that Google and Meta cannot do the same thing. In fact, a case could be made that Google is on the way to providing that.
Google search often comes up with a brief summary of the topic. The shift from a summary to an expanded answer is not a major one. Google gets tons of data on a daily basis, with YouTube alone providing more than almost all other sites on the internet.
Could it bring out Googlepedia? Most certainly. Naturally, it does not have to use the name but that is what it would effectively be doing.
Basically we are looking at automated Wiki. Each of these companies could create their own, using the data they receive daily along with the models.
Whatever the path these different companies take, the bottom line is that Wikipedia will drift into history. There is no way people keep turning to that as the source of information. The continued advancement of AI will ensure this.
