Searches are increasingly being performed by A.I. chatbots while the number of people visiting websites is falling, according to Cloudflare, a content delivery network company. While someone might once have Googled a soccer player’s World Cup performance and clicked to a sports site or a social media thread for commentary, a bot now crawls the web for that information and returns the player’s statistics to the user, who stays on Google.

In total, more than 50 percent of web traffic is now nonhuman, Cloudflare said. Between June 2025 and April 2026, human traffic to websites of businesses in industries like finance, publishing and retail dropped nearly 40 percent, it added.

Google’s A.I., along with other popular chatbots, have hit Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation, which manages the online encyclopedia, said it had experienced an 8 percent decline in human visitors to its site over the past year. At the same time, it has seen an increase in bots scraping its site for data to train A.I. models.

Refer: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/20/technology/google-ai-open-web.html