Math and Science Homework Pages Lost 46.4% of Their School-Year Wikipedia Readers Between 2021-22 and 2025-26

Summary

Picture a tutoring center that used to see sign-ups spike every September, when parents searched for help with algebra and chemistry. Lately the spike comes later and smaller. Students who get stuck now often ask a chatbot first. Wikipedia's homework pages give a sense of how big that shift may be.

We built a list of 772 articles that match what US middle and high schools teach, from the quadratic formula to photosynthesis to To Kill a Mockingbird. For the math and science pages, average views during the school year fell 46.4% between the 2021-22 and 2025-26 school years.

History and literature held up better, down 13.3%. Part of that is Hollywood: new film versions of classic books sent readers back to those pages. The math and science pages had no such help.

What we measured

We wrote a seed list of standard curriculum topics across seven subjects and matched each to its English Wikipedia title. We summed desktop and mobile web views by month for each subject.

For each school year we averaged monthly views for September to May (school months) and for the following June to August (summer), then compared the 2021-22 school year with 2025-26. We dropped titles with fewer than 1,000 views in 2022 or a change of more than 20 times in either direction, which usually signals a page rename. The full seed list is published as a methodology appendix.

STEM homework pages lost almost half their school-year readers

Average views per school month, by subject:

The math and science pages are the kind of material a student needs explained step by step, which is exactly what AI chat tools do. Literature and history readers often come to a page for context around a book, film or anniversary.

Readers left in summer too, so the school-year bump stayed the same

If AI replaced homework look-ups only, school months should have fallen more than summer. They did not.

Views held steady through 2023-24, then fell in both seasons. The drop is year-round, which points to a broad change in how people look things up, not only a change in homework habits.

Core science concepts made up most of the deepest single drops

Among curriculum pages with at least 50,000 views in 2022, these lost the most, and a few gained:

The gains line up with film releases, not with homework. Among the 416 math and science pages, only 4 gained readers between 2022 and the past 12 months.

What this means

Tutoring centers, test prep companies and online course sellers should expect fewer students to land on free explainer content before they look for paid help. The research step that used to happen on a search results page is increasingly a chat with an AI tool. Good SEO for AI search in education means making sure that chat names your program when a parent asks where to get help.

Make sure that when a parent or student asks an AI assistant for tutoring help in your area or subject, your business is in the answer. That takes clear pages about your programs, results, prices and locations. A free AI visibility audit will show where you stand today, and our AI search optimization services cover the fixes if gaps turn up.

Limits

Wikimedia pageview counts include some automated traffic that its filters do not catch, and Wikimedia changed how it detects bots in 2025, which lowers counted views from that point on. Some of the change in any period may reflect better bot filtering rather than fewer human readers.

We count views of titles that had at least 5 views in a given month on a given site, which drops a very small tail of rarely read pages.

The seed list reflects common US curricula and was built by hand; it does not cover every course.

School calendars vary by country and many readers are outside the US, so the school-month split is approximate.

Film and TV releases can lift literature and history pages regardless of school demand.

Frequently asked questions

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