AIData brief
28.1%
Bot share, week of 4 May
Bots now make up 36% of English Wikipedia pageviews, up from 28% in May
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.
- Bot share, week of 28 Sep
- 36.1%
- Share on 6 Oct (highest day since 1 May)
- 37.9%
- Avg daily bot views, May vs Sep-Oct
- 88M to 113M (+29%)
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.
Data, method and caveats
- Wikimedia REST API, aggregate pageviews, en.wikipedia.org, all-access, by agent type CC0 (Wikimedia analytics data) · captured 2026-10-07
- Ars Technica, OpenAI agents report news report (facts only) · captured 2026-10-07
- The Decoder, Wikimedia confirmation report news report (facts only) · captured 2026-10-07
- 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.
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