Weekday Work-Hour Wikipedia Reading Fell 8.0% Since 2022, Nearly Twice the 4.2% Drop in Weekday Evenings

Summary

Picture a marketing manager at a 40-person company who used to keep Wikipedia open in a tab to check terms before a client call. Now she asks the AI assistant built into her work tools. Multiply that by millions of office workers and you would expect daytime reading to fall faster than evening reading. The data says it did.

We grouped English Wikipedia page views by hour of the week and compared 2022 with the latest 12 months. Weekday views between 9am and 5pm US Eastern time fell 8.0%. Weekday evening views fell 4.2%, roughly half as much.

The gap is wider on desktop, where most office research happens: work-hour desktop views fell 10.0% against 5.7% in the evening. Weekend reading also fell 9.1%, so the decline is not limited to the office. The evening is the part of the week that held up best.

What we measured

Wikimedia publishes page views by hour in UTC. We summed English desktop and mobile web views for each of the 168 hours of the week in every month, then shifted them back 5 hours to approximate US Eastern time. English Wikipedia is read across the world, so these hours are a proxy for the US day, not an exact measure of US readers.

We compared calendar year 2022 with October 2025 to September 2026 for four time blocks: weekday work hours, weekday evenings, weekday overnight and weekends. Hourly totals come from a separate rollup that is not limited to articles, so they add up to slightly more than our article-level totals in other studies.

Work hours lost almost twice as much reading as evenings

Each block of the week lost readers, but not evenly.

Weekday evenings stand out as the most stable part of the week. Work hours, overnight and weekends all fell by roughly 8% to 9%.

On desktop, the work-hour drop reached 10%

Splitting by site shows desktop carrying more of the work-hour loss.

Desktop work-hour views went from 9.81 billion to 8.82 billion. Mobile evening views barely moved, from 11.91 billion to 11.51 billion.

Mid-morning took the biggest hit

Looking hour by hour on weekdays, the drop peaks in the late morning and is smallest after dinner.

The 10am hour lost 10.0% of its views and 7pm lost 2.2%. Late morning is a busy time for office look-ups, and a time when many workers may have an AI assistant open.

What this means

If you sell to businesses, your buyers do their research during the workday. That window includes the hour where reference reading has dropped the most, which fits the idea of AI tools at work taking over quick fact-checks and comparisons. Content written for a busy buyer at 10am now has to win a mention inside an AI answer, not only a click.

Look at your own traffic by hour. If weekday daytime visits to your guides are falling faster than evening visits, that is a sign buyers are getting answers elsewhere during work. Our free AI visibility audit shows what those answers say about your business, and if you want help acting on it, that is what we do as an AI search optimization agency.

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.

Hours use a fixed UTC minus 5 offset, so daylight saving time shifts each block by one hour for part of the year.

English Wikipedia readers are spread across many time zones, including Europe, India and Asia Pacific, so US Eastern hours are only approximate for US readers.

The weekend drop (9.1%) is similar to the work-hour drop, so the decline is not only an office effect.

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