Jan 08, 2026 10:35:00

Stack Overflow's question volume will fall 78% year-over-year by December 2025, likely due to developers switching to AI tools

The information technology community site Stack Overflow has seen a significant drop in the number of questions from users.

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

https://devclass.com/2026/01/05/dramatic-drop-in-stack-overflow-questions-as-devs-look-elsewhere-for-help/

Stack Overflow in freefall: 78 percent drop in number of questions - Techzine Global
https://www.techzine.eu/news/devops/137686/stack-overflow-in-freefall-78-percent-drop-in-number-of-questions/

Stack Overflow peaked in early 2014 with over 200,000 questions being asked per month, but this declined sharply from 2023 onwards, dropping to just 3,862 questions as of December 2025. This represents a 78% decrease from the previous year.

Technology media outlet DEVCLASS points out that this is because people are turning to AI tools to avoid the hassle of asking humans questions and the risk of receiving aggressive responses.

According to DEVCLASS, Stack Overflow's answerers can sometimes be unsympathetic, which can be frustrating for questioners. One Reddit user

commented , 'People are happy that they finally have a tool that doesn't tell them their questions are stupid,' referring to the AI tool. DEVCLASS also points out that Stack Overflow's focus on 'high-quality' questions is discouraging new users who want to ask casual questions.

A 2025 survey by Stack Overflow found that 84% of developers said they were using or planned to use AI tools, up from 76% the previous year.

A user on the social site Hacker News commented, 'The essence of Stack Overflow is getting answers to your questions. But if you could get the same answers faster, you wouldn't need Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow's decline began around 2016, and I suspect this is due to the rise of other sources of answers. One example is Reddit. Since 2016, when searching for technical questions on Google, links to Reddit have frequently appeared alongside Stack Overflow. The decisive blow , of course, is the large-scale language model. It can provide instant Stack Overflow-level answers to certain questions, without insulting users.'

Stack Overflow prohibits human users from using AI to answer questions, but introduced an AI tool to present answers to users in September 2025. One user criticized, 'I had great respect for Stack Overflow, which introduced its AI ban policy in 2022, but now they're doing this.'

Despite the decline in questions, revenue from paid software sales appears to be strong, with Stack Overflow owner Prosus reporting '12% sequential revenue growth, driven by the performance of Stack Overflow' in its half-year financial results for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2025.