Britannica.com - Wikipedia
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Online edition of Encyclopædia Britannica
Britannica.com
Screenshot
Screenshot of Britannica.com on 26 June 2025
Type of site
Online encyclopaedia
Available in
British English
Headquarters
Chicago
United States
Owner
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Editor
Jason Tuohey
URL
britannica
.com
Commercial
Yes
Content licence
ISSN
1085-9721
Britannica.com
is the
domain name
of the main website of
Encyclopædia Britannica
which provides partial free access to the paid online edition of the encyclopaedia, titled
Encyclopaedia Britannica
The paid edition is known as
Britannica Academic
previously
Britannica Online
It is published by
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
, which is based in Chicago, Illinois.
Content and features
edit
As of 2025, Britannica.com had over 130,000 different entries covering a wide variety of topics.
As of 2011, these articles have edit histories, providing a summary of information such as when the article was created, who has edited it, and when the article was last updated. The bottom of entries includes links to external websites.
It includes
search bar
allowing navigation to specific entries.
The site has a rotating selection of articles prominently featured on the main page that are changed on a regular basis. As of 2011, it also includes access to multimedia including tens of thousands of images as well as thousands of videos, animations and audio clips. The website also includes a selection of online games.
In 2000, in addition to the main encyclopedia text, Britannica.com was reported to include "current news, an internet guide that ranks Websites, the
Merriam-Webster
Dictionary and additional tools".
History
edit
Britannica was first launched online in 1994 as eb.com, which required a paid subscription to access,
originally for institutions $1 per year per full time enrolled student, or slightly later $150 a year for individuals. While at launch the
Britannica Online
had all of the articles of its print counterpart, due to speed limitations of the early internet, early online versions of the Britannica were sparse in images and multimedia compared to the book and
CD-ROM
versions of the encyclopaedia.
The 1994 launch happened at the end of several years of dramatic decline in sales of the print edition of the
Britannica
(which had dropped from 117,000 in 1990 to 51,000 in 1994), as well as other print encyclopedias, due to the emergence of competing electronic alternatives, such as the CD-ROM based
Microsoft Encarta
In 1999, the free website Britannica.com was launched, which contained the full text of the encyclopedia, as well as "an Internet search engine, subject channels, current events, and essays".
The website was so popular that it crashed on several occasions following launch.
10
Britannica.com later offered a subscription fee to remove advertising. eb.com was initially retained alongside Britannica.com for institutional subscribers such as schools and libraries.
In 2000, the subscription price was $85 a year.
While Britannica.com was initially completely free to use and supported by advertising,
it reduced the amount of freely available content on the website after 2001 due to financial difficulties.
By 2012, it had put up a partial
paywall
, requiring a subscription to fully access the website's content.
11
In 2001,
Wikipedia
launched. By 2003, it had already matched Britannica's internet traffic.
Around 2009, Britannica began allowing users to provide suggestions to modify/correct Britannica.com entries and briefly allowed users who had subject matter expertise to create their own Britannica entries, which would be checked and approved/denied by Britannica staff.
12
13
14
Example of an interaction with Britannica.com's AI chatbot
As of 2009
[update]
, roughly 60% of
Encyclopædia Britannica's
revenue came from online operations, of which around 15% came from subscriptions to the consumer version of the websites.
15
In 2012 Britannica Inc. discontinued the print edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, leaving the Britannica.com as the main version of the encyclopedia.
11
16
On 7 June 2018, Britannica released a
Google Chrome extension
, "Britannica Insights", which shows snippets of information from Britannica Online whenever the user performs a
Google Search
, in a box to the right of Google's results.
17
In 2024, the website began incorporating
AI
features, such as a
large language model
-based
chatbot
as part of the early 2020s
AI boom
18
19
Britannica saw its traffic decline by nearly a third from 2022 to 2025, from 69.5 million visits to 47.4 million visits in the month of March in those years (for comparison, Wikipedia was getting roughly 128 to 226 million views every day in 2025 on average).
20
In September 2025 and March 2026, Britannica filed lawsuits against AI companies
Perplexity
and
OpenAI
, respectively, alleging they had infringed its copyright by copying hundreds of thousands of its articles without permission for training data and information retrieval, which Britannica claimed is used to provide summaries which obviates the need to visit Britannica's website, which Britannica alleged has caused it to lose subscription and advertising revenue.
21
22
23
Reception
edit
Screenshot of the website's article on
feminism
Robert Rossney, writing in Wired shortly after the launch of eb.com in 1995, was sceptical of the need of encyclopedias in the internet age, stating: "Given that the Web itself is becoming the sum of the world's knowledge, isn't putting the Encyclopaedia Britannica online a spectacularly useless thing to do?"
24
A 2000 review by librarian Barbara M. Bibel in
The Charleston Advisor
described both the then-separate Britannica.com and
Britannica Online
as "one of the best encyclopedic sites on the Web, especially in terms of the written content", and suggested that they had "good basic searching including simple and advanced search modes", although she criticised the lack of multimedia content compared to the DVD version. She did not think that content provided by the paid version of
Britannica Online
was sufficiently different from the content offered by the free to access Britannica.com to justify a subscription.
A later 2011 review by Lizah Ismail in the same publication, by which time the two services were merged, was positive about the paid version (the institutional
Britannica Academic
and personal
Britannica Premium
had almost identical content), stating that they offered "good 'first stop' resources from encyclopedia entries, relevant Web sites, and e-books and primary sources, as well as full-text access to scholarly journals for further research", but was more critical of the free version, stating that it was "inundated with advertising that does appear excessive and could be quite annoying and distracting to some." and only provided access to the first 100 words of most articles.
In a 2015 retrospective study on reactions to the 2012 announcement of the print edition of the Britannica ceasing publication, it was noted that the wider reactions gave off the impression that "encyclopedia would cease to exist entirely" rather than just be online only, with most reader comments on
The
New York Times
articles on the subject observed to have "primarily referred to [the Britannica] as a print source, a set of books, first and foremost and as such it ceases to exist – at least it ceases to be ‘alive' [if it ceases to be printed]. ... With few exceptions, the reader comments do not consider the existence of
Encyclopaedia Britannica
online at all", which the authors of the study suggested reflected the diminished cultural relevance of the Britannica's current online incarnation compared to its historical book form.
25
Simon Garfield
described Britannica.com in his 2022 book
All the Knowledge in the World
as "not a bad place to hang out for a while. There is a lot of information one doesn’t need to pay for, and a neat home page displayed as a sort of historical newspaper, with stories on the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War, a good array of quizzes and crosswords, and an 'On This Day ...' column", and suggested that the Britannica is probably considerably more read as an online encyclopaedia in the Internet age than it ever was as a written book, even if numerically dwarfed by Wikipedia in traffic.
26
2005
Nature
study vs Wikipedia
edit
In 2005, the journal
Nature
chose articles from Britannica.com and
Wikipedia
in a wide range of science topics and sent them to what it called "relevant" field experts for peer review. The experts then compared the competing articles—one from each site on a given topic—side by side, but were not told which article came from which site.
Nature
got back 42 usable reviews. The journal found just eight serious errors, such as general misunderstandings of vital concepts: four from each site. It also discovered many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 in Wikipedia and 123 in
Britannica
, an average of 3.86 mistakes per article for Wikipedia and 2.92 for
Britannica
27
28
Although
Britannica
was revealed as the more accurate encyclopaedia, with fewer errors, in its rebuttal it called
Nature
's
study flawed and misleading and called for a "prompt" retraction. It noted that two of the articles in the study were taken from a
Britannica
yearbook and not the encyclopaedia, and another two were from
Compton's Encyclopedia
(called the
Britannica Student Encyclopedia
on the company's website).
29
Nature
defended its story and declined to retract, stating that, as it was comparing Wikipedia with the web version of
Britannica
, it used whatever relevant material was available on
Britannica
's
website.
30
See also
edit
Online encyclopedia
References
edit
Naidu, Pawan (26 February 2025).
"Britannica taps former Yahoo editor to lead publication in the era of AI"
Crain's Chicago Business
Archived
from the original on 12 March 2025
. Retrieved
12 March
2025
Kraus, Jermen & Jecić 2020
, p. 170.
Adefolalu 2024
Bibel, Barbara M. (2000).
"Encyclopedia Britannica: To Pay or Not to Pay – A Comparative Review of Britannica.com and Britannica Online"
The Charleston Advisor
(2):
5–
8.
Or, Amy (18 March 2024).
"Encyclopaedia Britannica Seeking $1 Billion Valuation in IPO"
Bloomberg News
. Retrieved
3 March
2026
"Frequently Asked Questions about Britannica Membership"
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Corporate Site
. Retrieved
13 June
2025
Ismail, Lizah (1 July 2011).
"Britannica Online Products: Britannica Online Academic (for Institutions) and Britannica Online Free and Premium (for Consumers)"
The Charleston Advisor
13
(1):
5–
13.
doi
10.5260/chara.13.1.5
ISSN
1525-4011
"Encyclopædia Britannica - Digital Reference, Encyclopedia, Knowledge | Britannica"
www.britannica.com
. Retrieved
13 June
2025
Loveland, Jeff (4 July 2019). "Chapter 10 - Encyclopedias after Print".
The European Encyclopedia: From 1650 to the Twenty-First Century
(1 ed.). Cambridge University Press.
doi
10.1017/9781108646390.011
ISBN
978-1-108-64639-0
"Surfers throw book at online Britannica"
Independent Online
(iol.co.za)
. 28 October 1999
. Retrieved
13 June
2025
Peckham, Matt (14 March 2012).
"Britannica Print Edition Kicks the Bucket, So Is Wikipedia Our New Lord and Master?"
Time
ISSN
0040-781X
. Retrieved
13 June
2025
Buskirk, Eliot Van (9 June 2008).
"Encyclopaedia Britannica To Follow Modified Wikipedia Model"
Wired
ISSN
1059-1028
. Retrieved
11 January
2026
Turton, Stuart (9 June 2008).
"Encyclopaedia Britannica dips toe in Wiki waters"
PC Pro
. Archived from
the original
on 10 June 2008.
"Britannica reaches out to the web"
BBC News
. 24 January 2009
. Retrieved
12 January
2026
Charlton, Graham (10 February 2009).
"Q&A: Ian Grant of Encyclopædia Britannica UK [interview]"
. Econsultancy. Archived from
the original
on 13 February 2009
. Retrieved
10 February
2009
"Encyclopaedia Britannica ends its famous print edition"
BBC News
. 14 March 2012
. Retrieved
13 June
2025
Kelly, Makena (7 June 2018).
"Encyclopædia Britannica's new Chrome extension is a simple fix to Google misinformation"
The Verge
Archived
from the original on 22 November 2018
. Retrieved
22 November
2018
de la Merced, Michael J. (20 December 2024).
"Britannica Didn't Just Survive. It's an A.I. Company Now"
The New York Times
ISSN
0362-4331
. Retrieved
13 June
2025
Schwartz, Eric Hal (4 June 2025).
"I compared ChatGPT to the Britannica AI chatbot, and the results make me want to buy the entire encyclopedia"
TechRadar
. Retrieved
13 June
2025
"Digital 2025: exploring trends in Wikipedia traffic"
DataReportal – Global Digital Insights
. 23 April 2025
. Retrieved
11 January
2026
Battersby, Matilda (16 September 2025).
"Encyclopaedia Britannica publisher suing AI company Perplexity over 'content copying'
The Bookseller
. Retrieved
16 March
2026
Jackson, Lucy (16 March 2026).
"Historic Scottish-linked encyclopaedia firm sues major AI company"
The National
. Retrieved
16 March
2026
Gil, Bruce (16 March 2026).
"Encyclopedia Britannica Sues OpenAI Over AI Training Data. Is Grokipedia Next?"
Gizmodo
. Retrieved
16 March
2026
Rossney, Robert (1 August 1995).
"Encyclopaedia Britannica Online?"
Wired
ISSN
1059-1028
. Retrieved
13 June
2025
Haider, Jutta; Sundin, Olof (24 April 2015).
"The materiality of encyclopedic information: Remediating a loved one – mourning britannica"
Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
51
(1):
1–
10.
doi
10.1002/meet.2014.14505101037
ISSN
0044-7870
Garfield, Simon (2022). "Y: Yesterday".
All the knowledge in the world: the extraordinary history of the encyclopaedia
. London: W & N, Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
ISBN
978-1-4746-1077-3
Giles, J.
(2005).
"Internet encyclopaedias go head to head: Jimmy Wales' Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries"
Nature
438
(7070):
900–
901.
Bibcode
2005Natur.438..900G
doi
10.1038/438900a
PMID
16355180
Terdiman, Daniel (15 December 2005).
"Study: Wikipedia as accurate as Britannica"
. CNET News. Archived from
the original
on 9 August 2012
. Retrieved
5 July
2011
"Fatally Flawed – Refuting the recent study on encyclopedic accuracy by the journal Nature"
(PDF)
. Encyclopædia Britannica, Incorporated. March 2006.
Archived
(PDF)
from the original on 2 December 2018
. Retrieved
30 June
2011
"Encyclopaedia Britannica and Nature: a response"
(PDF)
Nature
(Press release). 23 March 2006. Archived from
the original
(PDF)
on 25 March 2006
. Retrieved
21 October
2006
(nature.com's own archive is under
nature.com
Archived
19 November 2021 at the
Wayback Machine
, inside
Press release archives (zip): 2006
Archived
27 August 2021 at the
Wayback Machine
by filename
Encyclopaedia Britannica and Nature a response.pdf
. As of 20 November 2021, the PDF creation date is 2 August 2019)
Bibliography
edit
Adefolalu, Opetoritse A. (2024). "Ready-Reference Sources". In Wong, Melissa A.; Saunders, Laura (eds.).
Reference and Information Services: An Introduction
. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.
ISBN
979-8-216-17070-9
Kraus, Cvijeta; Jermen, Nataša; Jecić, Zdenko (2020). "An insight into online encyclopaedias for children and young adults".
7th International Conference The Future of Information Sciences INFuture2019: Knowledge in the Digital Age
. Department of Information and Communication Sciences, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia. pp.
167–
180.
doi
10.17234/infuture.2019
External links
edit
Wikidata
has the property:
Encyclopædia Britannica Online ID (P1417)
(see
uses
Official website
Retrieved from "
Categories
Online encyclopedias
Editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica
Hidden categories:
Webarchive template wayback links
Articles with short description
Short description is different from Wikidata
Use British English from March 2026
All Wikipedia articles written in British English
Use dmy dates from March 2026
Articles containing potentially dated statements from 2009
All articles containing potentially dated statements
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