Whilst doing some SEO bits for a client of mine (the brilliant COO Milly Barker who runs Pay As You Go COO) I noticed that a new website (with quite strong domain authority - if you believe in that sort of thing) was linking to her website.
I was curious who was linking and why; and then discovered it was none other than Elon Musk's AI-powered-alternative-to-Wikipedia that goes by the super creative name of Grokipedia.
This actually wasn't the only time this site had appeared on my radar - I had noticed it was linking to a friends business website too. I later found that it is also linking to a small site I have created about Rewilding in Galicia.
I think Grokipedia is becoming more active at linking out to external domains, in an attempt to add credence to the thousands (millions?) of articles it is churning out.
What is Grokipedia?
Grokipedia is Elon Musk's attempt at fighting back against "woke" Wikipedia (his words, not mine). He has been quite vocal in speaking out against Wikipedia and its liberal aims - and whilst he failed to get traction in his attempts to somehow shut it down, he did what all power-mad billionaires would do next - he decided to build his own alternative version. This is owned by xAI which was founded by Elon Musk and a team of 11 researchers in 2023.
Grokipedia therefore is another online encyclopaedia, almost identical to Wikipedia in form and function, the only difference being that much of his version is powered by Grok, his fascist, sexist AI tool, whereas Wikipedia relies on the work of many human editors.
Looking at the kind of organic traffic Grokipedia is getting (and I note that at time of writing, traffic was up and to the far-right - a position Elon seems to enjoy inhabiting) - it is largely based around porn actresses, TikTok influencers, and all other kinds of crap.
Organic traffic to Grokipedia.com according to SEO tool Ahrefs - from October 2025 to March 2026
There is little good traffic you could argue, but cumulatively (because the site is so huge) it does mount up. Ahrefs estimates that Grokipedia currently gets 586K visits per month from Google and is visible for 239K keywords.
The top organic keywords driving traffic to Grokipedia - most of these are internet "celebrities" for want of a better term.
Why does Grokipedia link to my website?
Because the site content appears to be fully AI generated, it still needs to cite its sources, otherwise it will have zero legitimacy or trust because clearly the AI could just be fabricating everything (which can and does happen). Any good website should reference its sources and it seems that Grokipedia does this automatically from the References section - and so this is where the links will be coming from.
Grokipedia links out to various sites in order to give some kind of merit or value to the content it spits out. This is how it is able to rip off the work of humans for its own selfish gain (so is basically the story of how AI works!)
I wonder if Musk's main plan here is to create another platform that can be monetised (through ads for example) or is solely deemed a power-play. Arguably the value of being able to influence opinions across a wide range of topics is far higher than any kind of direct advertising revenue...
Some of the top performing organic pages of the Grokipedia website
Can I stop Grokipedia from linking to my website?
This is an interesting idea/question but I don't think there is a viable way of doing this.
Imagine trying to get an AI-powered website to actually have people listening to feedback! It is hard enough getting legitimate human-powered websites to remove unwanted links.
I recall that football club Manchester United had some kind of weird no-link policy where it requested that other sites don't link to theirs - I still have no idea why (some kind of security policy I imagine) or how they are able to enforce such a policy. This is kind of how the internet works… sites link to each other… otherwise everything is very siloed and disconnected.
What you might be able to do here is to block Grok's LLM crawlers from hitting your website altogether. That would require some kind of technical changes at the host level of your website. Robots.txt can set rules on a bot-by-bot basis but I am sure that Grok and AI crawlers will ignore these (which means they are considered bad bots because robots.txt exclusions should be obeyed).
I also believe Cloudflare as a service has some interesting bot blocking features too, but I'm not sure if you can block specific LLM crawlers.
Is Grokipedia going to take on Wikipedia - and become a reliable source of information?
I guess this is one concern - that eventually given enough time Grokipedia could feasibly rival the likes of Wikipedia in terms of content, and then potentially to outrank it with organic visibility.
This creates a fairly big problem on the web, because you will have another resource that can be owned/tweaked/modified by someone with right-wing fascist ideologies.
This is a man who already owns one of the most powerful social media networks in X, as well as literally owning the infrastructure that lots of people around the world will use to access the web through StarLink.
Google and X are already in a paid partnership, and their ideologies currently seem quite aligned, otherwise you would have hoped that the search engine might take action against the prospect of Grokipedia gaining too much organic visibility.
You can imagine the outcry from Musk if they did take action ("this is against free speech, Google is supposed to be neutral", etc etc). But I wonder if more ethically-minded search engines could or should somehow limit visibility of a site like Grokipedia? Or warn users within the browser / search results? Or is this over-stepping their mark?
Currently Grokipedia has been live for just 7 months and organic growth has been fairly swift during that period. There has been a drop off around March/April, but things look to be back on track. Assuming the site continues to spit out content at it's current rate, you can only imagine the traffic will continue to grow.
Final Thoughts on Grokipedia - is it a threat to Wikipedia?
The summary of the above is that Grokipedia (Elon Musk's latest project) is taking on Wikipedia by churning out a lot of content, and in doing so it is also linking to many other websites within their references.
There's not much more to it but it will be interesting to see how things develop here. Will organic growth continue at this pace? Does Musk later plan on using the visibility of the site to influence people's thoughts on a range of topics - like a more evil version of Wikipedia?
No-one really knows the long term strategy here. I can't see any signs that the site will go away though.
