Dramatic drop in Stack Overflow questions as devs look elsewhere for help

Stack Overflow, long the go-to resource for developers seeking coding help, saw its question volume plummet further in 2025. Only 3,862 questions were posted in December – a 78 percent drop from the previous year.

At its peak in early 2014, Stack Overflow received more than 200,000 questions per month.

The shift is clear: developers now turn to AI tools directly within their IDEs, bypassing both the hassle of forum posts and the risk of dismissive moderators. That second factor matters more than many realize as discussions of Stack Overflow’s decline invariably surface stories of hostile treatment. Responding to the recent statistics, one developer put it bluntly: “AI certainly accelerated the decline, but this is the result of consistently punishing users for trying to participate in your community. People were just happy to finally have a tool that didn’t tell them their questions were stupid.”

There are other perspectives on this. Moderation is difficult, and the site aims (with limited success) to have a smaller number of high quality questions rather than a constant stream of common queries. The result though is that the site has been respected rather than loved by many of its users, contributing to its decline now that it is less necessary.

Some in the Stack Overflow community argue that counting the number of questions is a poor metric. “When your goal is to have a ‘library of detailed, high-quality answers’, you don’t die because you run out of new attempts at questions,” said one.

That said, a decline of nearly 80 percent in one year, on top of steep declines in previous years, is remarkable and suggests a change in developer behavior, such that Stack Overflow is no longer part of their workflow. The trend is reinforced by the desire of Google and others to keep users on their property rather than sending them to another site. AI is perfect for this as it learns from external data and regurgitates it locally – though with the caveat that it is sometimes wrong, and lacks the reasoned expert debate which can be found in the best Stack Overflow discussions.

Some developers therefore worry about the long-term impact of losing Stack Overflow. “SO was by far the leading source of high quality answers to technical questions. What do LLMs [large language models] train off now?” asked one in response to the latest data.

There is also an impact on those who track data on programming languages. The Redmonk Language ranking uses Stack Overflow for half of its data, with the other half coming from public GitHub repositories. “At this point half of the data feeding the programming language rankings is increasingly stale and of questionable value on a going-forward basis, and there is as of now no replacement public data set available,” said analyst Rachel Stephens.

Stack Overflow has always been free for developers, with a business model based initially on recruitment and later on paid-for private versions of its collaboration software. This means that declining traffic does not correlate directly with revenue; and owner Prosus reported in its half-year results to 30 September 2025 that “Stack Overflow and GoodHabitz achieved revenue growth of 12 percent to US$95m, primarily driven by Stack Overflow’s performance.”

Last month the company introduced AI Assist as a “new entry point to our public platform.” It is AI but driven primarily by Stack Overflow data. The oddity here is that providing answers to Stack Overflow questions via generative AI tools remains banned. “I had huge respect for Stack Overflow when you introduced ‘no AI’ policy back in 2022. And now you go ahead and do this. Just terrible,” said one comment.

Along with this confusion, the company may struggle to establish AI Assist when so many similar services are available, including those from tech giants such as Google, AWS, and Microsoft/GitHub.