Study: Despite Wikipedia’s Visibility Decline In Google, It Still Shows Up More Often Than Google Properties
A new study from Stone Temple Consulting validates previous studies showing Wikipedia's Google traffic is declining.
A month or so ago, we reported on reports, somewhat confirmed by the founder of Wikipedia, that they are losing traffic in Google. Meaning that overall, they are seeing less traffic to their website from Google organic search.
This was initially based on a report from SimilarWeb, and then a partial confirmation of sorts from Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia.
Today, Stone Temple Consulting released a new study around Wikipedia’s Google traffic from before and after the SimilarWeb report. The report shows that Wikipedia did show a decrease in URLs in the top 10 results in both commercial and informational queries in Google search.
The chart below shows, by date, what percent of queries show a Wikipedia URL in the top 10:
Here is the same chart by ranking position, which would show the decline in the number 1 and 2 positions for Wikipedia in Google:
The funny part is, the study compared how much Wikipedia URLs show up in Google’s search results compared to Google, and it showed Wikipedia still shows up significantly more often than Google properties in the results. Here is a chart showing that:
To see more of this data, check out the study over here.
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In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.
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