ChatGPT Just Surpassed Wikipedia in Monthly Visitors: What That Says About the Future of Knowledge
The internet shifted quietly, but profoundly, and most people didn’t even notice.
As of this month (May 2025), ChatGPT now receives more monthly visitors than Wikipedia. I’m a part of this statistic, to be honest with you. I use ChatGPT to ask questions to now instead of searching Wikipedia.
That might sound like just another tech milestone…something to scroll past, nod at, and forget. But pause with me here for a moment, because this isn’t just a race between two websites.
This is about how we ask questions, how we define authority, and how we learn.
This literally marks a moment in history when the encyclopedia of the internet has been eclipsed by the conversation of the internet.
So what does it mean when the world starts asking ChatGPT more than it asks Wikipedia?
The Numbers
In April 2024, Wikipedia averaged about 5.4 billion monthly visits.
In May 2025, ChatGPT surpassed that number for the first time.
That’s more than just impressive growth…it’s a paradigm shift.
In case you didn’t know, Wikipedia is the fifth most visited website in the world, it’s available in over 300 languages, curated by thousands of volunteers, and genuinely a foundational pillar of the modern web.
ChatGPT is a conversational AI launched less than two years ago. It’s a tool, not a website, and isn’t human-curated, but trained on human data. Honestly, if you’ve used it before than you know, it’s still in its experimental and evolving phase.
And yet…more people are going to ChatGPT for answers than to the encyclopedia of the internet, and I think it’s because ChatGPT talks back to us.
Wikipedia offers knowledge as a destination, while ChatGPT offers knowledge as a dialogue. That’s the real core of this moment. I went to Rutgers University in New Brunswick for a few years. My Biology class had 600 people in it. That was more than my graduating class. You want to know how much attention I got in that lecture hall? Zero. Nada. Ziltch. You know what’s hard to learn when you can’t ask any questions? Literally anything.
For two decades, we’ve been trained to search, click, skim, synthesize, sit there and just absorb information like a sponge in a sink.
But now, we can finally ask questions, have someone clarify if one aspect confuses us, refine points and personalize learning in a way we never have been able to before.
Instead of navigating a forest of hyperlinks, we can say explain this to me like I’m five.
And then, we get an answer tailored to us. It’s not just information…it’s a different kind of relationship with knowledge.
Wikipedia is the Library. ChatGPT is the Librarian.
Wikipedia is the vast, sacred archive that people all over the world add books to. It holds facts, citations, and consensus, but you have to know what to look for or you’ll get lost down one of the many hallways.
ChatGPT is the librarian who walks you to the right aisle, pulls down three books, and says,
Here’s what they say. Here’s the nuance. Want it shorter? Want it in bullet points? Want a pun at the end?
One is about breadth, while the other is more about access, and that access is changing how we learn.
Of course, this raises a crucial question I keep asking over and over again in my blog. Should we trust ChatGPT more than Wikipedia? The answer, like most things in this new world, is murky and the truth is, it depends.
Wikipedia is fact-checked, citation-heavy, and human-moderated. ChatGPT is probabilistic, predictive, and still prone to hallucination (yes, that’s the actual term for when AI confidently makes stuff up). But most users already know this…and still prefer ChatGPT.
People don’t want perfect knowledge, they want fast understanding with nuance and adaptability. They want to feel seen while they learn instead of one of the 600 in a lecture hall. In a world of absolute information overload, personalization wins.
The End of the One-Size-Fits-All Answer
Wikipedia offers a single version of the truth that’s static, cited, and crowd-vetted. A stamp of approval from “experts” all over the globe.
ChatGPT offers a different spectrum of learning. You can ask it to explain something to you as if you were a chef, ask it to summarize something in ten words or less, give you a counterargument for your paper, or ask it to pretend to be Shakespeare or Elon Musk.
It’s not about replacing the truth anymore, it’s more about customizing context to fit all of our needs. In a noisy world full of social media that does nothing other than confuse you, that makes all the difference.
Teachers used to say to me in college, “don’t trust Wikipedia.”
Now they (probably) say, “don’t let ChatGPT write your paper.” I’m long past the age of schooling, so I wouldn’t really know what’s going on in the classrooms, but I can imagine. Also, I’m a life student.
But the real opportunity lies not in restriction, but in reorientation. I mean, we’re witnessing the birth of conversational learning, AI-tutored education, dynamic curriculum delivery, and on-demand feedback loops. The future classroom might not be a room at all, much less a giant one, it could be a private AI that knows how you think.
The idea is both thrilling and daunting to me because it means we’re moving from a world of collective learning to individualized cognition…each mind a galaxy of its own, guided by machines.
There are real concerns here worth mentioning as well. Who governs the bias in ChatGPT’s answers? Don’t tell me it’s not biased, because it absolutely is. Every time I ask it to generate an image it creates something I can tell is biased. What happens when it’s wrong, but persuasive? Hallucinations are a thing. I used to use ChatGPT for fact checking on my blogs but stopped when I realized it was MAKING UP CITATIONS!!! Can you imagine how horrified I was when I realized that? You can ask it not to do that in the future and it still does, by the way.
Who defines “truth” in a world shaped by algorithms? At this point whoever controls all the training materials for AI programs are the ones rewriting history and making everything how they want it to be. Ever hear the phrase history was written by the winners? Yeah, this is that, but worse.
If Wikipedia has flaws, they’re visible as others rush in to edit it. If ChatGPT has flaws, they’re often beautifully hidden beneath fluent grammar and a confident tone and even made up URLs. So the burden of discernment in the end, falls not on the platform, but on us.
And honestly, that’s a new kind of literacy we’re all still learning.
Wikipedia Will Still Matter
Wikipedia is open-source while ChatGPT is proprietary. I’m not saying ChatGPT is going to come in and make everything on the internet irrelevant. Don’t forget we need people and art to create the massive data to train our programs on.
Wikipedia is also globally accessible while ChatGPT is still gated in some regions and paywalled for deeper features.
Wikipedia is built by us while ChatGPT is trained on us, but not with us. If that makes sense?
The encyclopedia may have been eclipsed in traffic, but absolutely not in value. (Ever see the episode of Friends where Joey tries to buy the stack of encyclopedias?)
We still need the static to ground the dynamic and we still need archives, so our AIs know what to learn from.
That ChatGPT has surpassed Wikipedia says less about the platforms, and more about us. I’m personally tired of sifting through all the data of the interwebs. I get overwhelmed by tabs, and I’ve always yearned for something that speaks in our language, in our tone, and on our timeline.
We’re not lazy, we’re evolving, and the internet will evolve with us. I’m not done reading, but I am looking for tools that listen before they inform. Right now, ChatGPT is doing that better than anyone else.
This is only the beginning. (Not trying to be ominous here, but I can’t find a less dramatic phrase).
In the coming years, we’ll likely see AI-powered Wikipedia companions, personalized search engines, hybrid tools that blend citation with conversation, and entire websites built only through dialogue.
ChatGPT may be the first to cross this milestone, but it won’t be the last, not as things progress at the rate they already are.
And as we move forward, we’ll keep asking what do we want from our knowledge keepers, how do we build trust in an AI-driven world, and can we teach machines to be wise, not just informative?
The answers will come eventually, and not as static text, but as conversation.
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