How Wikipedia Lost 3 Billion Organic Search Visits To Google in 2019

Since Wikipedia was founded in 2001, people worldwide rely on it to expand their horizons and read information on just about everything. As true as that is today, however, the popular site’s traffic trends tell a very different story. Over the years we’ve noticed that its traffic has been decreasing, a pattern that accelerated in 2019. This blog will explore how, and why, the famous online encyclopedia is experiencing such a decline.

The Numbers Behind the Traffic Loss: Wikipedia Desktop Traffic Explored

Over the past 24 months, Wikipedia has lost billions of monthly organic visitors to zero-click results. When looking at its desktop traffic alone we see that in January 2019 the site won 2.2 billion visits, a number that dropped dramatically to 1.9 billion by January 2020 (a decrease of -14%).

While the site still has billions of monthly visitors, those visits are becoming harder and harder to win as evidenced by the decline. Of course, while zero-click search results are primarily responsible for this trend they aren’t completely to blame for the site’s traffic drop. Zero-click results mean a user searched in/on Google, and found a direct answer to his or her search without needing to visit the actual site. YouTube videos rank at the top of Google’s knowledge graph, and are often also among the top organic search results, making it Wikipedia’s fiercest competitor.

The Zero-Click Effect

Google introduced Knowledge Graphs and Direct Answers in 2015, which is when we first noticed a decline in organic traffic to Wikipedia. This change took away the need to click on a specific link to see the desired results, so search queries began ending with “zero-click” results.

While this has been very convenient for people, as traffic to Wikipedia shows, it has been less than ideal for businesses, as out of almost 890,000 monthly searches worldwide only 30,000 actually become search visits to a website. Let’s quickly look at a basic search of the weather forecast as an example.

We Googled weather in Los Angeles and the data above was provided by weather.com. As you can see, we were able to get the answer to our question without clicking through to the actual site. The impact on traffic is staggering – only 15% of weather in Los Angeles searches actually result in a click and therefore a visit to weather.com. That means a staggering 85% of people see this weather forecast and never actually click on the search results.

“I won’t be a rockstar. I will be a legend.” 

Freddie Mercury: Wikipedia’s Best Keyword Analyzed

To better understand this declining trend, we took a look at Wikipedia’s top 20 organic keywords. As you can see below, Wikipedia’s most valuable search keywords are for celebrities, movies, and TV series. So, the natural next step is to dive into its top-performing keyword, Freddie Mercury, to see what its traffic patterns show.

Although Freddie Mercury died in 1991 before Wikipedia was founded, his name has become the site’s top-performing keyword in 2020. A quick Google query of his name pulls up a plethora of information about him, including his Wiki page, YouTube videos, and loads of news articles. But, 71% of those searches end there, without a click to a specific site.

Looking at the organic, mobile traffic for the search reveals zero-click results have cost Wikipedia’s English language subdomain tens of millions of organic visits. This whopping decline has been more apparent on mobile devices when Google shows an answer, it often shows no other results, unlike on desktop where other results are below.

So, Where Has Wikipedia’s Traffic Gone?

In 2015, we noted that Google was able to steal over 550 million clicks from Wikipedia in six months, and here we are five years later watching that trend accelerate. While many factors are contributing to that decrease, the vast majority of Wikipedia’s traffic has been lost to Google’s zero-click results, emphasizing the power Google has over search traffic.

This is just a sample of the latest marketing trends we’ve observed recently. To get a full report about how to conduct research to create a strong SEO strategy check out our latest how-to guide.