Wikipedia Pages About Skilled Trades Lost a Median 37.8% of Their Readers Since 2022, While Tech and Office Job Pages Lost Close to 60%

Summary

Picture a plumbing company owner in Ohio whose careers page still gets steady visits from young people curious about apprenticeships, while a marketing agency down the road finds that almost nobody reads its 'what does a content strategist do' blog post anymore. Wikipedia's job pages show a similar split.

We tracked 178 Wikipedia articles about jobs, from electrician and welder to data analyst, accountant and graphic designer, and compared their readers in 2022 with the past 12 months. The typical job page lost half its readers. Skilled trades lost the least, a median 37.8%. Tech and office roles lost close to 60%.

One possible reason: office and tech workers are heavy users of AI assistants, so their questions about their own fields may be among the first to move there. People curious about hands-on trades may still go looking for the details.

What we measured

We built a seed list of 186 common occupations in six job families and matched each to its English Wikipedia title. We summed desktop and mobile web views and compared calendar year 2022 with October 2025 to September 2026.

We excluded pages with fewer than 1,000 views in 2022 or views that rose or fell more than twentyfold. A few large office and service pages had unusually high 2022 traffic, so we lead with the median change per page rather than family totals.

Trades lost the least; tech and office roles lost the most

Median change per job page by family:

Among larger pages, Human resources fell 72.1%, Data analysis 71.5%, Copywriting 79.5% and Graphic designer 62.9%. In the trades, Welder fell 50.9% and Carpenter 56.0%, but Bricklayer rose 4.4% and Glazier fell only 9.9%.

Trades held steady for two years; office roles slid right away

Total views by job family, indexed to 2022:

Office and business totals are pulled down by a few very large 2022 pages, which is why the medians are the better guide. Even so, the order is clear: trades first, office roles last.

Desktop readers of office job pages left fastest

Change in views by site and job family:

The people who read about tech and office jobs on desktop may often be doing those jobs at a computer already, with an AI assistant open. Healthcare was the exception, losing more on mobile than on desktop.

What this means

If you hire, your careers content is part of how candidates find you. For trades businesses, people still research the work itself, so a clear page about what your apprentices do, what they earn and how they progress is still read. For office, tech and creative roles, candidates may increasingly ask AI tools what a job involves and which employers to look at. An AI SEO consultant can test those questions for your roles and show which employers get named.

Make sure AI assistants can find accurate facts about your company as an employer: the roles you hire for, your location, pay ranges and what makes your team different. A free AI visibility audit can show how AI tools describe your business to job seekers as well as customers, a side of SEO for AI search few employers check.

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 was built by hand and covers common occupations, not every job.

Some job titles share a page with a broader topic (for example Massage or Retail), which mixes career interest with general interest.

A few large pages had unusually high 2022 traffic, which inflates family-level totals; medians are less affected.

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