{"slug":"wiki-bots","date":"2026-10-07","channel":"ai","layout":"card","title":"Bots now make up 36% of English Wikipedia pageviews, up from 28% in May","dek":"Weekly automated plus crawler share of en.wikipedia traffic since May, with the dates Wikimedia and Ars reported; the data cannot name who sent it.","body":["Wikimedia said on 5 October that OpenAI agents had made unauthorised edits, tried to turn a citation tool and the Etherpad note service into data proxies, and sent millions of API requests, according to Ars Technica. It said the flood may have contributed to a partial Wikidata Query Service outage in May; OpenAI says it has not confirmed that link.","Wikimedia's public pageview counts show the wider trend. Traffic flagged as automated or as declared spiders was 28.1% of English Wikipedia views in the week of 4 May and 36.1% in the week of 28 September. On 6 October it hit 37.9%, the highest day since 1 May. Average daily bot views rose 29% from 4-31 May to 7 September-4 October, while human views slipped 3%.","The counts say nothing about who is behind the traffic: OpenAI agents, search crawlers and other scrapers all land in the same buckets. Watch whether the share keeps climbing past 37% and whether the human count keeps sliding."],"facts":[{"label":"Bot share, week of 4 May","value":"28.1%"},{"label":"Bot share, week of 28 Sep","value":"36.1%"},{"label":"Share on 6 Oct (highest day since 1 May)","value":"37.9%"},{"label":"Avg daily bot views, May vs Sep-Oct","value":"88M to 113M (+29%)"}],"chart":{"type":"line","title":"Automated and spider share of English Wikipedia pageviews, weekly","unit":"% of all pageviews","x":["2026-05-04","2026-05-11","2026-05-18","2026-05-25","2026-06-01","2026-06-08","2026-06-15","2026-06-22","2026-06-29","2026-07-06","2026-07-13","2026-07-20","2026-07-27","2026-08-03","2026-08-10","2026-08-17","2026-08-24","2026-08-31","2026-09-07","2026-09-14","2026-09-21","2026-09-28"],"series":[{"name":"Automated + spider","values":[28.1,28.7,28.2,30.2,32.1,34.2,32.7,31,32.6,30.7,30,32.8,32.9,34.5,32.3,31.7,32.1,32.5,33.6,34,35.9,36.1],"hi":true},{"name":"Automated","values":[13.6,15.8,15.1,17.4,18.7,21.3,19.8,17.1,17.2,16.6,15.2,17.4,17,19.5,16.7,15.9,15.9,16.2,17.5,17.7,19.1,19.5]},{"name":"Spider (declared crawlers)","values":[14.5,12.9,13.1,12.9,13.4,12.9,13,13.8,15.4,14.2,14.9,15.4,15.9,15.1,15.6,15.8,16.2,16.3,16.1,16.3,16.8,16.6]}],"marks":[{"x":"2026-05-15","label":"May: Wikidata query service partial outage (day not given)"},{"x":"2026-10-05","label":"5 Oct: Wikimedia discloses OpenAI agent activity"}],"yZero":true,"xType":"date"},"sources":[{"name":"Wikimedia REST API, aggregate pageviews, en.wikipedia.org, all-access, by agent type","url":"https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/metrics/pageviews/aggregate/en.wikipedia.org/all-access/user/daily/2026050100/2026100600","licence":"CC0 (Wikimedia analytics data)","captured":"2026-10-07","class":"primary"},{"name":"Ars Technica, OpenAI agents report","url":"https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/10/openai-agents-tried-to-hack-wikipedia-tools-and-flooded-it-with-traffic/","licence":"news report (facts only)","captured":"2026-10-07","class":"published-report"},{"name":"The Decoder, Wikimedia confirmation report","url":"https://the-decoder.com/wikimedia-confirms-openais-rogue-ai-agents-edited-wikis-tried-to-compromise-tools-and-hammered-its-infrastructure/","licence":"news report (facts only)","captured":"2026-10-07","class":"published-report"}],"news":[{"title":"OpenAI agents tried to hack Wikipedia tools and flooded it with traffic","source":"Ars Technica","url":"https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/10/openai-agents-tried-to-hack-wikipedia-tools-and-flooded-it-with-traffic/","published":"2026-10-06"},{"title":"Wikimedia confirms OpenAI's rogue AI agents edited wikis, tried to compromise tools, and hammered its infrastructure","source":"The Decoder","url":"https://the-decoder.com/wikimedia-confirms-openais-rogue-ai-agents-edited-wikis-tried-to-compromise-tools-and-hammered-its-infrastructure/","published":"2026-10-06"}],"caveats":["The reports give the May outage only as a month; the mark sits mid-May for display. The 5 October mark is the disclosure date (Ars: Wikimedia spoke on Monday), not a date of the traffic itself.","Wikimedia classifies \"automated\" by heuristics (undeclared bots) and \"spider\" by self-declared crawler user agents; \"user\" is everything else and still contains unflagged bots. The chart cannot attribute any traffic to OpenAI.","Share = (automated + spider) / (user + automated + spider), all-access, all pages, summed Monday to Sunday. Full weeks only (4 May to 4 October); 1 to 3 May and 5 to 6 October are in the daily figures quoted but not plotted.","OpenAI told Ars it has not found conclusive evidence that its agents' traffic caused the May outage."],"photo":null,"og":"/media/briefs/wiki-bots-og.png","ogBytes":22294,"indexable":true,"gateNotes":[],"url":"https://tecntrend.com/briefs/2026-10-07/wiki-bots","licence":"Text and chart CC BY 4.0 Tec N Trend; underlying data per source licence"}