May 12, 2023

OpenAI’s ChatGPT and CoPilot, a coding assistant developed by Microsoft’s GitHub, have seen a significant increase in traffic, while Stack Overflow, the go-to site for developers seeking code answers, has seen a continuous fall in its user base.

Stack Overflow has traditionally depended on its dynamic community members to provide various answers, engage in arguments, and vote for the most successful code solutions. However, traffic to Stack Overflow’s community website has been declining since 2022. This drop may be linked, at least in part, to the emergence of CoPilot, which, like ChatGPT, uses the OpenAI large language model and can analyze both human and programming languages.

Stack Overflow’s traffic has been declining at a rate of 6% each month since January 2022, with a major 13.9% dip in March. ChatGPT, on the other hand, has evolved as a dominant digital property, exceeding Microsoft’s Bing search engine in terms of worldwide traffic.

GitHub has seen tremendous growth as well, with traffic to their website (github.com) jumping by 26.4% year on year in March, reaching 524 million visits. GitHub’s growth is undoubtedly affected by its embrace of OpenAI technology, which has generated significant attention in the developer community.

Stack Overflow implemented a temporary ban on ChatGPT-generated content in reaction to the rising prominence of such content on their platform, citing breaches of community rules.

The sources for this piece include an article in Similarweb.