Wikipedia’s human page views fell approximately 8% year over year from March through August 2025, according to Wikimedia Foundation CEO Bernadette Meehan, underscoring the tension between the encyclopedia’s value to AI systems and the risk that AI-generated answers reduce visits to the site. The decline became visible after Wikimedia improved its bot-detection systems, removing automated traffic that had increasingly appeared human. Bandwidth used for media downloads across Wikimedia projects has risen 50% since January 2024, driven mainly by AI scrapers and crawlers. More than 90% of Wikipedia’s historical traffic has come through Google search, making the site vulnerable as search engines and chatbots provide answers without requiring users to click through. Meehan, who became CEO on January 20, 2026, after serving as US Ambassador to Chile from 2022 to 2025, is pressing AI developers for clearer attribution and greater support for the ecosystem from which they draw information. Wikimedia keeps Wikipedia free for readers and editors while operating Wikimedia Enterprise, which sells structured data access to commercial users. Publicly disclosed customers include Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Perplexity, whose payments account for 10% of Wikimedia’s operating expenses; OpenAI and Anthropic are not publicly disclosed customers, although Meehan said other agreements exist. About 80% of Wikimedia’s operating budget comes from small donations, while readers also provide a pipeline of future volunteer editors. Meehan said AI should assist rather than replace human contributors, and warned that commercial AI could exclude languages and communities that are less attractive to technology companies.