Surge in Wikipedia Traffic Driven by AI Scrapers

Wikipedia has experienced a 50% increase in traffic, primarily due to AI models and scrapers accessing the site for information rather than a rise in human users. This surge poses significant challenges as these bots generate excessive costs for Wikipedia, despite the platform being free to use. The company highlighted that approximately 65% of its most expensive traffic originates from these bots, indicating that automated traffic incurs higher server costs compared to human traffic. As AI models often ignore standard protocols like robot.txt files meant to restrict scraping, the financial burden on platforms like Wikipedia continues to escalate.