• by Laurie Sullivan , 4 hours ago

Wikipedia announced new business deals with artificial intelligence (AI) companies. The change marks the nonprofit online encyclopedia's 25-year anniversary.

The online crowdsourced encyclopedia revealed that it has signed agreements with AI companies including Amazon, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Mistral AI, and Perplexity.

Wikipedia signed a licensing deal in 2022 with Google, which has called the site a trusted source, and signed deals with smaller AI firms like the search engine Ecosia. It views these other partnerships as a way to keep operating.

Wikipedia did not provide specific aspects of the financial deals in the announcement.

Previous deals with AI companies also include Nomic, Pleias, ProRata, and Reef Media. All these organizations use Wikimedia Enterprise to integrate human-governed knowledge into their platforms.

Wikipedia announced the deals in a blog post, but Lane Becker, president of Wikimedia Enterprise, told Reuters in an interview that “Wikipedia is a critical component of these tech companies' work that they need to figure out how to support financially.”

The idea to keep Wikipedia’s platform thriving is to move these companies from its free platform to a commercial platform, which will cost money to access the information. Wikimedia Enterprise is a paid commercial platform.

The shift offers several advantages for brands and advertisers. While promotions and ads do not appear on the platform, the data it serves up remains critical for marketing and reputation management.

 A Wikipedia page is often the first search result for a brand, allowing companies to present a factual, expert-verified history that establishes legitimacy.

In November 2025, BrightEdge’s data suggested Wikipedia’s data got cited in Google AI Overview searches 1.9% of the time, ahead of Facebook data at 1.2% of the time.

Broken into categories for what BrightEdge calls “high-volume informational queries,” Wikipedia was cited 52% of the time.

Extensive data-collection practices by AI platforms and chatbots have posed significant challenges to the platform operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. And declining traffic and artificial intelligence are not the only threats Wikipedia faces. Elon Musk last year launched his own version of an AI-driven encyclopedia.

Last year the company revised its site’s algorithms based on identifying an increase in non-human bot traffic. As a result of those algorithmic changes, Wikipedia’s developers began to see declines in human pageviews. Site traffic fell about 8%, as compared with the same months in 2024.

Tinuiti, an Independent ad agency, also noted in a report that cite traffic published in November fell toward the end of 2025, based on an internal survey.

The company attributes the declines to generative AI and changes to the way people search and use social media to find information. Wikipedia called out search engines that provide answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content, without taking them to the site. The information instead is served up in the chat.