Study: Google AI Overviews cut Wikipedia search referrals 5%

A University of Washington paper estimates Google’s AI Overviews cut monthly search referrals to English Wikipedia by roughly 5% since the feature became the US default in 2024, per authors Mehrzad Khosravi and Hema Yoganarasimhan, as reported by Search Engine Journal. Google disputes the estimate, saying Wikimedia’s public referral data lumps together all search engines rather than isolating Google’s; the authors counter that other engines carry too little traffic to explain the gap. An earlier draft of the same paper, using daily pageviews instead of monthly referrals, had put the decline near 15% before the authors revised downward after adding international controls.