Wikipedia vs Grokipedia: 5x the Pages, 70x the Citations, 1615x the Traffic

Wikipedia plays a cornerstone role in influencing online visibility. But what about Grokipedia, the new AI-generated wiki on the block?

Is Grokipedia a serious competitor to Wikipedia, or just a doomed exercise in billionaire hubris? Does Grok bring new value to the table, or just rehash the same old content? Does Grokipedia influence AI search in a similar way to Wikipedia?

To find out, we used data from Ahrefs Site Explorer and Brand Radar to compare crucial metrics: page count, traffic, AI citations, page length, semantic similarity, and much more.

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anchored heavily in the existing search results, it’s perhaps no surprise that Grokipedia—with a much lower average ranking position than Wikipedia—struggles to get cited in AIOs.

By contrast, ChatGPT seems to have a relative bias against citing Wikipedia, but no such issue with Grokipedia.

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Given that Wikipedia is a crucial source of training data for most LLMs, and Grokipedia is written entirely by generative AI, I wanted to know: how similar are Grokipedia and Wikipedia pages?

To find out, we compared 10,000 “topic pairs”: pairs of Wikipedia and Grokipedia pages covering the same topic and referring to the same entity.

The mean semantic similarity of these topic pairs was 0.791, and the median was 0.831:

This is very strong semantic overlap. For context, if we take Grokipedia pages and compute their cosine similarity with random Wikipedia pages (that is, mismatched pairs), the mean cosine similarity is ~0.62.

Similarly, if we take other pages that rank for the same keywords as Grokipedia and Wikipedia pages, the average cosine similarity is ~0.61:

83% of the topic pairs we analysed had a cosine similarity greater than 0.62, indicating that Grokipedia pages share a very strong semantic overlap with Wikipedia pages describing the same entity:

Final thoughts

Grokipedia seems to represent a new model for wikis: AI-generated content designed for AI consumption.

Grokipedia has a relatively strong influence on AI citations, relative to its size, but a relatively weak influence on real people (as measured by estimated pageviews). Grokipedia pages are very similar to Wikipedia pages on the same topic, and it’s hard to avoid the image of the ouroboros eating its own tail. Certainly, the reading experience seems more intended for AI consumption than human.

Ahrefs Site Explorer estimates that Grokipedia’s organic traffic has already fallen to half of its previous peak—so perhaps Google agrees with my assessment.