Source: GWI Core (full disclosure, I work for GWI, sharing this in a personal capacity)
I’ve seen a number of people discuss how ChatGPT is moving up the leaderboard of most popular websites, and wanted to validate that with the research my company has been doing.
Bonus fact: Almost half of all students around the world now use ChatGPT – almost as many as the % who use Amazon!
It’s sort of comparing apples and oranges, chatgpt is more like a search engine than an encyclopedia, so Google would be a better comparison
KikeRiffs on
Although i understand where does this comparison goes, it is relative.
If Chatgpt gets the data from Wikipedia, does this graph included every time a user queried ChatGPT consults wikipedia?
Edit: typos
slumberboy6708 on
People are using LLM instead of actually researching information. They are using a tool that spits out a result sculpted by what companies / governments decide to train it on. This is terrifying.
My little sister is in highschool and she can’t even look something up on Google. Her attention span expires before she reaches a result. ChatGPT is to her what Wikipedia is to me.
Hermononucleosis on
How were respondants selected? Only one third having visited Wikipedia seems extremely low if it’s people who use the internet daily, but if it also includes people who only use the internet to log onto Facebook once a week, that would make more sense.
Interestingly, it seems like Wikipedia use at least hasn’t gone down with the rise of ChatGPT, and that it seems to have been going down after a spike during COVID?
Hovi_Bryant on
Are we not comparing apples and oranges here? GPT has other use cases than research. It’s possible some use it almost entirely for those use cases and not research.
Edit: I almost use it entirely for planning, strategizing, code review and rubber ducking ideas. I use Wikipedia for its intended purpose but I don’t recall having an account.
I get what OP is trying to convey with the data, but I don’t think the data fits without finding a way to narrow the dataset so that there is a 1:1 comparison between research related queries for GPT and research related queries for Wikipedia.
It may still be in favor of what we’d expect, but as of right now, it’s not good data.
DunnoMouse on
This is not NECESSARILY a problem. As long as sites like Wikipedia still exist. I’ve found that if you use ChatGPT responsibly and use it mostly as a tool to give you sources and summarize them upfront, it can really make your life easier if you need to research often. For instance, where before I had to scan and read an entire Wikipedia page for an information about something that might not even be there, I can now just ask ChatGPT (or Perplexity) a question, have it give me sources and check myself in the source if I’m being lied to.
However, a lot of people just skip that crucial second step and take what ChatGPT tells you at face value, which is often not correct, or not quite correct.
sparkly-potato-42 on
what I find interesting is that the number of wikipedia users doesn’t go down at the same rate as the number of chatgpt users goes up. So people use both? Or people who don’t go to wikipedia at all started using chatgpt?
HighOnGoofballs on
Well, I guess I’m an outlier since I have never once used that or any other of those sites but I have used Wikipedia recently
Doctrina_Stabilitas on
It feels like 2006 and how everyone was like “Wikipedia is bad for society because it’s crowd sourced anonymous individuals”
The fear mongering over the decline of scurry is overblown, at the end of the day people are lazy and look for information where it’s available
NatsuDragnee1 on
Yikes. ChatGPT should not be used as a factual source for anything.
At least with Wikipedia, you can check the primary sources cited.
puffinus-puffinus on
Wikipedia usage is decreasing? I had no idea 🙁
Wagsii on
I wonder what was causing Wikipedia’s decline before Chat GPT too
MrFolderol on
The downfall of civilisation in one graph.
mustafa_i_am on
These two don’t coincide. People use Wikipedia for research, while they use ChatGPT for millions of things. That does not necessarily mean people use AI instead of Wikipedia.
Fernando1dois3 on
Why was Wikipedia trending down?
esuardi on
The laziness I see from people to just “ask chatGPT” instead of utilizing a few minutes researching a topic, etc. My sister recently broke our gaarbage disposal AND quoted tiktok about it not being fixable. She’s 33. Fucking embarrassing. Couldn’t be bothered to look at the user manual and read up on it……the age in instant gratification is upon us.
greham7777 on
If by user they mean someone who used a third party app where there is a feature built on GPT, yes. People going to chatgpt.com? Not sure.
NobodyLikesThrillho on
Might be time to finally make that donation to Wikipedia…
IslandFearless2925 on
This is too vague to be significant, I’m sorry.
First off, as other people have pointed out, English wiki or ALL wiki? They’re different sites.
And what about the ChatGPT metrics? ChatGPT isn’t just an information program. People use it for all sorts of things. It branches all facets, and is integrated in TONS of third party programs. Are those counted here, too? Because that will skew the data.
That aside, even–
Wikipedia is an information resource. ChatGPT is an all-around service.
It’s like comparing the Encyclopedia Britannica to People magazine. They are not the same.
LunarWingCloud on
This is not beautiful data
Redneckia on
And that small rise in Wikipedia visits is probably just o3 looking things up
redmoon714 on
I had an apple employee use ChatGPT in front of me when I had a question he didn’t know the answer to.
Flonkadonk on
If this goes on like this, in 10 years people who have rigorously avoided using LLMs for cognitive offloading and trained themselves to gain the discipline to do research and thinking and problem-solving independently – they will look like Einstein compared to the average ChatGPT drone NPC.
Leverage LLMs as tools, don’t let yourself be leveraged as a user. This was exactly what Frank Herbert feared in the Dune series by the way – his “thinking machine” threat in the series wasn’t Terminator Killer Robots, but instead Man giving over their thinking to the machine, allowing them to be enslaved by other men with machines. Don’t enslave yourself but use it responsibly.
veryblanduser on
I want my biased misinformation from random strangers, not computers.
equalent on
This data is scary, not beautiful
_tcartnoC on
f to pay respects to society
Helpful-Beginning553 on
It is astonishing to see how low the percentage of Wikipedia users is. 😢
numberjhonny5ive on
As it likely used wikipedia as a data source.
velociraptur3 on
Proud to say that I have never used ChatGPT. And if I could turn off Google AI, I would.
SeveralBollocks_67 on
I guess AI is my old man hill to die on. I saw the internet evolve for 3 decades and each iteration was a learning experience with its ups and downs. AI shit is going to take a while for me to accept.
Sure, the internet was always full of fakes and bots… But they weren’t driven by AI algorithms. Thats getting harder and harder to recognize by the day.
lylath21 on
Is this even surprising? This technology has completely flipped how we do research and gather information. Even just the slightest look at how education is being up ended is all you need to see that Wikipedia would easily be overtaken by chatgpt. Add on the fact you can see Wikipedia every year has to ask for donations to keep the lights running while government and private investors are pouring billions of dollars into this technology of course it’s going to dwarf what Wikipedia could do. A more interesting comparison would be how much chatgpt is eating of Google’s lunch for general questions?
wtf_ftw on
Embrace: scrape wikipedia and use it as a foundation of your new tool.
Extend: create a proprietary chat interface that makes it more convenient to access wikipedia content.
If you squint, chatgpt is doing an EEE strategy on the whole internet (minus social media).
wwarnout on
Given how often ChatGPT is wrong, can we even trust this chart?
CO_Renaissance_Man on
This is straight up tragic.
People are blindly trusting this “AI” while losing skills and the ability to vet information.
All to avoid self-improvement, work, and picking up a book.
Arbitrage_1 on
Aren’t most of those users bots, for both platforms
BonJovicus on
Wikipedia isn’t perfect, but this is far worse. People are not only going to get false information, but people are completely losing their ability to find important information. At least on wikipedia you’d be forced to read the article. Search engines expedited the search process, but didn’t eliminate it.
Glaciata on
This isn’t beautiful. This sort of data makes me want to burn down a data center. Absolutely horrific.
WavvyJones on
Doesn’t help that when I used to google something Wikipedia would be at the top of the results ( and often was what I was looking for), whereas now when I google something I feel like I have to scroll for a bit to find Wikipedia, if it’s there at all. Often if I want that I have to search “[search subject] wiki” to even find it!
JoypulpSkate on
ITT: People under 20 who weren’t around to see Wikipedia scrutinized to the same degree in the early years.
Oberlatz on
False equivalency
These two things do not serve the same purpose. I don’t ask wikipedia about recipes or story ideas.
This is what ChatGPT generated for me when I asked for a meat chart.
(It’s wrong and the cow has 6 legs).
Legend_of_dirty_Joe on
plot twist, most users are itself and other ai engines
SixSierra on
Because now ChatGPT is one of the power user of Wikipedia. It literally pulls information from there when doing its research.
huxtiblejones on
God, the reliance on AI so quickly is going to bite us in the ass. It’s not just a tool that helps you find things, but it “thinks” for you and that presents all kinds of pitfalls. Its thoughts can be manipulated by the people or governments that control it giving this false impression that it’s objective when it isn’t. It’s also just flat out factually incorrect at times, which all sources can be, but it will sometimes be _confidently_ incorrect on shit that’s obvious.
![[OC] ChatGPT now has more monthly users than Wikipedia](https://www.byteseu.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/xnqnc61bjx0f1-1536x1536.png "[OC] ChatGPT now has more monthly users than Wikipedia")
50 Comments
Tools used: Datylon
Source: GWI Core (full disclosure, I work for GWI, sharing this in a personal capacity)
I’ve seen a number of people discuss how ChatGPT is moving up the leaderboard of most popular websites, and wanted to validate that with the research my company has been doing.
Bonus fact: Almost half of all students around the world now use ChatGPT – almost as many as the % who use Amazon!
This is kinda terrifying to me, not gonna lie.
https://preview.redd.it/bs0moivukx0f1.jpeg?width=248&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f8ccb586d2c3c17e1f42316687c284343c16cfc3
that’s fucking depressing
Every wikipedia or only the English one ?
It’s sort of comparing apples and oranges, chatgpt is more like a search engine than an encyclopedia, so Google would be a better comparison
Although i understand where does this comparison goes, it is relative.
If Chatgpt gets the data from Wikipedia, does this graph included every time a user queried ChatGPT consults wikipedia?
Edit: typos
People are using LLM instead of actually researching information. They are using a tool that spits out a result sculpted by what companies / governments decide to train it on. This is terrifying.
My little sister is in highschool and she can’t even look something up on Google. Her attention span expires before she reaches a result. ChatGPT is to her what Wikipedia is to me.
How were respondants selected? Only one third having visited Wikipedia seems extremely low if it’s people who use the internet daily, but if it also includes people who only use the internet to log onto Facebook once a week, that would make more sense.
Interestingly, it seems like Wikipedia use at least hasn’t gone down with the rise of ChatGPT, and that it seems to have been going down after a spike during COVID?
Are we not comparing apples and oranges here? GPT has other use cases than research. It’s possible some use it almost entirely for those use cases and not research.
Edit: I almost use it entirely for planning, strategizing, code review and rubber ducking ideas. I use Wikipedia for its intended purpose but I don’t recall having an account.
I get what OP is trying to convey with the data, but I don’t think the data fits without finding a way to narrow the dataset so that there is a 1:1 comparison between research related queries for GPT and research related queries for Wikipedia.
It may still be in favor of what we’d expect, but as of right now, it’s not good data.
This is not NECESSARILY a problem. As long as sites like Wikipedia still exist. I’ve found that if you use ChatGPT responsibly and use it mostly as a tool to give you sources and summarize them upfront, it can really make your life easier if you need to research often. For instance, where before I had to scan and read an entire Wikipedia page for an information about something that might not even be there, I can now just ask ChatGPT (or Perplexity) a question, have it give me sources and check myself in the source if I’m being lied to.
However, a lot of people just skip that crucial second step and take what ChatGPT tells you at face value, which is often not correct, or not quite correct.
what I find interesting is that the number of wikipedia users doesn’t go down at the same rate as the number of chatgpt users goes up. So people use both? Or people who don’t go to wikipedia at all started using chatgpt?
Well, I guess I’m an outlier since I have never once used that or any other of those sites but I have used Wikipedia recently
It feels like 2006 and how everyone was like “Wikipedia is bad for society because it’s crowd sourced anonymous individuals”
The fear mongering over the decline of scurry is overblown, at the end of the day people are lazy and look for information where it’s available
Yikes. ChatGPT should not be used as a factual source for anything.
At least with Wikipedia, you can check the primary sources cited.
Wikipedia usage is decreasing? I had no idea 🙁
I wonder what was causing Wikipedia’s decline before Chat GPT too
The downfall of civilisation in one graph.
These two don’t coincide. People use Wikipedia for research, while they use ChatGPT for millions of things. That does not necessarily mean people use AI instead of Wikipedia.
Why was Wikipedia trending down?
The laziness I see from people to just “ask chatGPT” instead of utilizing a few minutes researching a topic, etc. My sister recently broke our gaarbage disposal AND quoted tiktok about it not being fixable. She’s 33. Fucking embarrassing. Couldn’t be bothered to look at the user manual and read up on it……the age in instant gratification is upon us.
If by user they mean someone who used a third party app where there is a feature built on GPT, yes. People going to chatgpt.com? Not sure.
Might be time to finally make that donation to Wikipedia…
This is too vague to be significant, I’m sorry.
First off, as other people have pointed out, English wiki or ALL wiki? They’re different sites.
And what about the ChatGPT metrics? ChatGPT isn’t just an information program. People use it for all sorts of things. It branches all facets, and is integrated in TONS of third party programs. Are those counted here, too? Because that will skew the data.
That aside, even–
Wikipedia is an information resource. ChatGPT is an all-around service.
It’s like comparing the Encyclopedia Britannica to People magazine. They are not the same.
This is not beautiful data
And that small rise in Wikipedia visits is probably just o3 looking things up
I had an apple employee use ChatGPT in front of me when I had a question he didn’t know the answer to.
If this goes on like this, in 10 years people who have rigorously avoided using LLMs for cognitive offloading and trained themselves to gain the discipline to do research and thinking and problem-solving independently – they will look like Einstein compared to the average ChatGPT drone NPC.
Leverage LLMs as tools, don’t let yourself be leveraged as a user. This was exactly what Frank Herbert feared in the Dune series by the way – his “thinking machine” threat in the series wasn’t Terminator Killer Robots, but instead Man giving over their thinking to the machine, allowing them to be enslaved by other men with machines. Don’t enslave yourself but use it responsibly.
I want my biased misinformation from random strangers, not computers.
This data is scary, not beautiful
f to pay respects to society
It is astonishing to see how low the percentage of Wikipedia users is. 😢
As it likely used wikipedia as a data source.
Proud to say that I have never used ChatGPT. And if I could turn off Google AI, I would.
I guess AI is my old man hill to die on. I saw the internet evolve for 3 decades and each iteration was a learning experience with its ups and downs. AI shit is going to take a while for me to accept.
Sure, the internet was always full of fakes and bots… But they weren’t driven by AI algorithms. Thats getting harder and harder to recognize by the day.
Is this even surprising? This technology has completely flipped how we do research and gather information. Even just the slightest look at how education is being up ended is all you need to see that Wikipedia would easily be overtaken by chatgpt. Add on the fact you can see Wikipedia every year has to ask for donations to keep the lights running while government and private investors are pouring billions of dollars into this technology of course it’s going to dwarf what Wikipedia could do. A more interesting comparison would be how much chatgpt is eating of Google’s lunch for general questions?
Embrace: scrape wikipedia and use it as a foundation of your new tool.
Extend: create a proprietary chat interface that makes it more convenient to access wikipedia content.
Extinguish: this graph.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
If you squint, chatgpt is doing an EEE strategy on the whole internet (minus social media).
Given how often ChatGPT is wrong, can we even trust this chart?
This is straight up tragic.
People are blindly trusting this “AI” while losing skills and the ability to vet information.
All to avoid self-improvement, work, and picking up a book.
Aren’t most of those users bots, for both platforms
Wikipedia isn’t perfect, but this is far worse. People are not only going to get false information, but people are completely losing their ability to find important information. At least on wikipedia you’d be forced to read the article. Search engines expedited the search process, but didn’t eliminate it.
This isn’t beautiful. This sort of data makes me want to burn down a data center. Absolutely horrific.
Doesn’t help that when I used to google something Wikipedia would be at the top of the results ( and often was what I was looking for), whereas now when I google something I feel like I have to scroll for a bit to find Wikipedia, if it’s there at all. Often if I want that I have to search “[search subject] wiki” to even find it!
ITT: People under 20 who weren’t around to see Wikipedia scrutinized to the same degree in the early years.
False equivalency
These two things do not serve the same purpose. I don’t ask wikipedia about recipes or story ideas.
https://preview.redd.it/05zmqsu61y0f1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ed7ef644172470ea807277f0c6218f646a4e5a86
This is what ChatGPT generated for me when I asked for a meat chart.
(It’s wrong and the cow has 6 legs).
plot twist, most users are itself and other ai engines
Because now ChatGPT is one of the power user of Wikipedia. It literally pulls information from there when doing its research.
God, the reliance on AI so quickly is going to bite us in the ass. It’s not just a tool that helps you find things, but it “thinks” for you and that presents all kinds of pitfalls. Its thoughts can be manipulated by the people or governments that control it giving this false impression that it’s objective when it isn’t. It’s also just flat out factually incorrect at times, which all sources can be, but it will sometimes be _confidently_ incorrect on shit that’s obvious.
I hope ChatGPT won’t start editing Wikipedia…