Stack Overflow now gets fewer than 1,000 questions a month
New questions on Stack Overflow fell from 207,169 in March 2014 to 969 in September 2026. The slide began before AI chatbots, but since 2023 it has become a near total drop, and the company has started a separate service for AI agents.
It appears that programmers have almost stopped asking each other for help on Stack Overflow. The site got 969 new questions in September 2026. In March 2014 it got 207,169. The fall started years before AI chatbots, but in the last three years it has gone from a slow slide to almost nothing. That's what I find interesting.
Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for people who write code. Someone posts a problem, strangers answer it for free, and the best answer is voted to the top.
The numbers
I counted new questions month by month through Stack Exchange's public data feed on the morning of 29 October 2026, by UTC calendar months. Here is March of each year.
| March | New questions |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 20,477 |
| 2010 | 52,220 |
| 2012 | 132,936 |
| 2014 | 207,169 |
| 2016 | 201,386 |
| 2018 | 172,823 |
| 2020 | 155,866 |
| 2021 | 148,696 |
| 2022 | 123,261 |
| 2023 | 87,123 |
| 2024 | 44,707 |
| 2025 | 15,075 |
| 2026 | 2,987 |
The site peaked in 2014. From there to 2022 it lost about 40% of its questions, slowly. From March 2023 to March 2026 it lost about 97%.
This year, month by month:
| Month | New questions |
|---|---|
| January 2026 | 3,619 |
| March 2026 | 2,987 |
| May 2026 | 1,985 |
| July 2026 | 1,175 |
| August 2026 | 1,019 |
| September 2026 | 969 |
| October 2026, to 29 Oct | 949 |
In the 24 hours before I checked that morning, 65 new questions were posted, and 121 answers. Of September's 969 questions, 113 were tagged Python.
The back story
The slide started before AI. Wikipedia's page on the site, as PPC Land reported in August, blames two things: a moderation culture many new users found hostile, and AI tools. Dror Poleg makes the same point on his chart of the numbers, and adds that a moderators' strike in 2023 and later rules on AI content also played a part, so the drop after 2022 cannot be put down to AI alone.
PPC Land calls the count an unusually clean measure. Most website traffic moves for lots of reasons at once, and most of those don't touch this number, which comes down to a programmer deciding whether to type a question into a public page or into a chat window. It isn't perfectly clean, for the reasons above, but it is closer than most.
The old answers are still there. The site holds about 24 million questions and 36 million answers, and PPC Land notes that the count of new questions says nothing about how many people still look things up in that archive.
The company's answer came in June. Stack Overflow for Agents is a test service where AI coding agents search the old answers first and, if nothing fits, write up what they learned as a new post. A person has to approve each post before it goes up. So people have mostly stopped asking, and the company has opened a separate service for machines.
What I could not check
The data feed does not count questions that were later deleted. Older months have had longer for that to happen, so the real fall is probably a little steeper than these numbers show, which is PPC Land's point too. Different sources also give different counts for the same month, and I don't know why. For June 2026 I counted 1,701 where PPC Land reported 1,076 in August, and for July I counted 1,175 where it reported 1,442. Deletion can only lower a count over time, so it doesn't explain gaps that go both ways.
The feed's own summary says 2.53 questions a minute, which would be about 109,000 a month. The 65 questions in the last day say that figure is out of date, but I could not find when it was last updated.
The Hacker News post that led me here linked a Stack Exchange query page, and that page blocked me, so every count above is my own.
I could not find any figure for how many people still read the site each day.