Wikipedia: The One Platform You Can’t SEO Your Way Into
AEO, GEO and LLMO, oh my! Wikipedia is secretly at the center of a new marketing discipline. Plus, how Wikipedia editors reacted to a Wikimedia Foundation experiment with AI summaries.
📰 In the News
To AI or not to AI?
That is the question of the month! Wikipedia's answer? Yes… then no. In early June, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that the volunteer-edited online encyclopedia would be trying out some new AI features, including a two-week, opt-in trial course for AI-written summaries of top articles.
The community response was an emphatic thumbs down. In various forums around Wikipedia, editors questioned the usefulness and accuracy of the feature. Others pointed out Wikipedia’s own reputation for reliability has never been rock solid, and this wouldn’t help. At least two editors simply said, "yuck".
The Wikimedia Foundation has an iffy track record when it comes to rolling out new features, even ones that it thinks will help its community of editors. In 2013, the debut of Wikipedia’s rich-text editing feature, Visual Editor, was temporarily rolled back after an editor backlash. Now as then, some editors did not feel the WMF had gathered enough input from the community.
No matter the caveats: it was only a test, only for a few of the most popular articles, only for the mobile site, only on an opt-in basis, and with an “unverified” tag to alert users. The WMF had also given plenty of heads up: the WMF announced in May its plan to use AI in product infrastructure and research.
Never let it be said that the WMF does not listen, and they quickly put the whole thing on “pause”. In fact, it never saw the light of day. But just as the Visual Editor eventually became the default for newly registered accounts, the WMF said that it still wants to use AI on the site—but that future moves will consult editors first.
🔔 Wiki Briefing
Everyone’s Talking AI Search. Few Understand Wikipedia.
AI-powered search is having a moment. Answer engine optimization (AEO) and its identical twin, generative engine optimization (GEO), are the latest additions to the digital strategy playbook. Substack posts, LinkedIn essays, and agency blogs exploring how to influence large language model outputs are multiplying. The goal is straightforward: appear in AI-generated answers.
At the center of this new ecosystem—whether widely acknowledged or not—is Wikipedia. It remains one of the most frequently cited sources in responses from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews, and other tools. That’s partly due to its scale and structure, but also to how retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems favor high-trust domains. While much of the open web has become saturated with SEO-churned or AI-generated content, Wikipedia continues to hold the line—see below—thanks to its sourcing rules, active moderation, and community governance.
And yet, industry misunderstanding persists. A recent Ahrefs blog post encouraged marketers to “claim your Wikipedia listings”—a phrase borrowed from local SEO that doesn’t map onto how Wikipedia operates. You can’t claim a Wikipedia listing. No one gets to own it. As AEO and GEO practices continue to evolve, Wikipedia is likely to become an even more critical point of influence.
🌎 It’s a Wiki, Wiki, Wiki, World
Wikipedia articles in different languages are not simply a 1:1 translation of their English article equivalent. Each language has a group of dedicated editors that work to make their language site their own. Here’s what some of these other communities are up to lately:
Iceland: Eysteinn Guðni Guðnason wants your help: upload vacation photos of Iceland to Wikimedia Commons. Guðnason made a map of all the places in Iceland that have a Wikipedia article but no images. His goal is to reduce that number of places without images to zero.
Punjab: Punjabi Wikipedia turned 23 this month! It's just one year younger than the English language edition.
New Zealand: The Kiwis are the latest to join the club of national Wikimedia chapters. They were recognized on June 12 and joined a group of nearly 40 around the globe.
🧩 Wikipedia Facts
7,000,000: The number of articles on the English Wikipedia! The online encyclopedia hit this long-awaited milestone on May 28. The lucky 7 millionth article is Operators and Things, a 1958 book about a woman's experience with schizophrenia (which also might be a hoax).
💡 Tips & Tricks
You don't just have to edit or read Wikipedia—you can shop it, too! The Wikipedia Store means that you can donate to the pursuit of accessible knowledge and rock some fashionable swag.
