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
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.
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?
Edit: thanks for all the comments. Yeah it makes total sense that people just use both for different purposes
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
Yikes. ChatGPT should not be used as a factual source for anything.
At least with Wikipedia, you can check the primary sources cited.
I wonder what was causing Wikipedia’s decline before Chat GPT too
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
ITT: People under 20 who weren’t around to see Wikipedia scrutinized to the same degree in the early years.
This is what ChatGPT generated for me when I asked for a meat chart.
(It’s wrong and the cow has 6 legs).
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.
This is the least beautiful data I’ve ever seen
Humanity’s conversion into the people from WALL-E continues. We can’t even be arsed to click a web link to ascertain a fact anymore, we just blindly ask an LLM and take what it says as gospel even if it’s a demonstrably inaccurate hodgepodge of conflicting information.
Imagine if in a few centuries we don’t even have the skillset/inclination to research things at all. Then it only takes a superstate to control the outputs from AI, or just all the AI getting turned off entirely, to leave humanity in a totally uninformed state of idiocracy.
![[OC] ChatGPT now has more monthly users than Wikipedia](https://www.europesays.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/xnqnc61bjx0f1-1920x1024.png)
30 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.
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?
Edit: thanks for all the comments. Yeah it makes total sense that people just use both for different purposes
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
Yikes. ChatGPT should not be used as a factual source for anything.
At least with Wikipedia, you can check the primary sources cited.
I wonder what was causing Wikipedia’s decline before Chat GPT too
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
ITT: People under 20 who weren’t around to see Wikipedia scrutinized to the same degree in the early years.
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).
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.
This is the least beautiful data I’ve ever seen
Humanity’s conversion into the people from WALL-E continues. We can’t even be arsed to click a web link to ascertain a fact anymore, we just blindly ask an LLM and take what it says as gospel even if it’s a demonstrably inaccurate hodgepodge of conflicting information.
Imagine if in a few centuries we don’t even have the skillset/inclination to research things at all. Then it only takes a superstate to control the outputs from AI, or just all the AI getting turned off entirely, to leave humanity in a totally uninformed state of idiocracy.
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