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.
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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.
Once dependent on ads across its buzzy forum, Stack Overflow now primarily makes money from enterprise solutions like “Stack Internal,” which provides a generative-AI add-on powered by the millions of questions and answers on the site through the years. Stack Internal is now used by 25,000 companies around the world. It also licenses its data to AI companies, in a Reddit-like model — a platform that made more than $200 million from licensing user-generated content in 2024.
Put simply, Stack Overflow’s new niche is the trust built by its old community and their expertise. In the words of CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar last December:
“...when we saw the questions decline in early 2023, what we realized is that pretty much all those declines were with very simple questions. The complex questions still get asked on Stack because there’s no other place. If the LLMs are only as good as the data, which is typically human curated, we’re one of the best places for that, if not the best for technology.”
Large language models want data about coding problems and how to solve them. Stack Overflow has a big digital warehouse full of that, but it’s increasingly aging, as queries move into private chat windows with LLM models... which need huge chunks of data to work. Stack Overflow has become a fascinating canary in tech’s new, circular coal mine.