Stack Overflow’s forum is dead thanks to AI, but the company’s still kicking... thanks to AI

The platform is raking in millions of dollars in revenue, with AI an ironic new source of revenue.

When Elon Musk described Stack Overflow’s plight as “death by LLM” in July 2023, he wasn’t exaggerating.

Having been the go-to resource for developers looking for technical help for a long time, Stack Overflow neared the peak of its powers during the pandemic, with coders seeking the evergreen information on the company’s popular Q&A forum. But amid a wave of powerful code-writing AI assistants like ChatGPT, Cursor, Claude, Google’s Gemini, and Microsoft’s Copilot, traffic to the site has plummeted.

Last month, Stack Overflow recorded just 6,866 questions — roughly equal to the typical volume when the site first launched back in 2008.

But while Stack Overflow the Q&A forum looks dead, Stack Overflow the company looks to be limping along.

Unlike Chegg and other knowledge hubs that have fallen victim to generative AI, Stack Overflow has found a way to monetize its enormous back catalog of content. Indeed, even with engagement falling off a cliff since ChatGPT’s 2022 debut, the company’s annual revenue has roughly doubled to $115 million. Losses have slimmed, too, from $84 million in FY2023 to $22 million as of the last fiscal year, as desperate cost-cutting efforts, including mass layoffs, helped boost the bottom line.