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Data study of 301025 AI answers: how often Wikipedia is cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Grok, month by month over 13 months.
Wikipedia is cited in 1.62% of measured answers over the last three months, which places it third of the platforms tracked. It is cited by all five models, most often by ChatGPT at 3.43% and least often by Claude at 0.03%.
Wikipedia was the most cited source of the panel and lost most of that share within the measured period.
A citation rate of 2% means the source was cited twice for every 100 measured answers. Rates are computed per model against the number of answers of that model, so a model with a smaller sample never distorts a column. A source cited several times inside one answer is counted once per company block, which keeps a single verbose answer from dominating a month.
The gap between the model that cites Wikipedia most and the one that cites it least is 3.4 points. That spread, not the average, is what should decide a budget: the same work returns most on ChatGPT and least on Claude. Across all tracked platforms, Wikipedia ranks third.
Over the 13 months measured, Wikipedia moved from 5.28% in August 2025 to 1.39% in August 2026, with a peak of 11.31% in October 2025. Averaged over the first three months against the last three, the movement is minus 7.94 points.
The decline is the single largest movement in the dataset, and it changes a widely repeated piece of advice. Getting an encyclopedic entry is still useful on the model that keeps citing it heavily, and close to irrelevant on the models that have moved towards reviews, video and community content. The safer reading is that the models diversified their sources rather than that Wikipedia lost quality. For a business, the entity information that Wikipedia carries still matters, but it is no longer the shortcut it was a year ago.
Every number on this page comes from the public Sorank dataset. The underlying figures, the monthly detail and the filters are available here:
Open the source data on data.sorank.com
Data updated on 2026-08-26.
This study is free to quote, in an article, a deck or a report. Please cite the source and the measurement period, because the numbers move every month.
Sorank (2026). Wikipedia AI Citation Study: Does Wikipedia Get You Cited by the AIs. Sorank GEO studies, measured on 301025 AI answers collected between August 2025 and August 2026. Available at https://www.sorank.com/data/wikipedia-ai-citation-study
The same panel, read from another angle:
This study describes a market. Sorank measures your site: which questions mention you, which mention someone else, and what to publish to change that, tracked weekly across the same five AI.
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Wikipedia is cited by all five models measured. ChatGPT cites it most, in 3.43% of its answers, and Claude least, in 0.03%. The full model by model breakdown is on this page.
On 301025 answers from five AI, collected between August 2025 and August 2026, with every cited source extracted and normalised. The citation rate is the number of citations per 100 measured answers. The public dataset is on data.sorank.com.
For entity clarity, yes. For citation volume, much less than a year ago. In this panel its rate fell by most of its starting value over 13 months, while review platforms moved the other way.
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