As ChatGPT continues to prove its mettle in coding, claiming an ever-larger presence in online development communities, data from SimilarWeb reveals that its success could be chipping away at the old guard in the form of Stack Overflow.
For more than a decade, Stack Overflow has been a popular destination for tech-savvy coders looking to find help and advice on their development challenges. Now, however, the website seems to be suffering a decrease in year-over-year visits, indicating a possible downturn in favor of ChatGPT’s ascendance.
According to SimilarWeb’s analysis, Stack Overflow’s traffic has been steadily decreasing every month since January 2022, culminating in a 14% decrease from the previous year in March, when the total visits to stackoverflow.com was only 258 million.
On the other hand, since its launch in November 2022, ChatGPT has been rising star. In the first half of April, the site attracted a staggering 1.6 billion visits and 920.7 million in March alone.
ChatGPT is appealing to a wider audience than just developers, a fact that is illustrated by the rising popularity of GitHub, another source for common coding challenges. GitHub had a 26.4% increase year-over-year in March, reaching a total of 524 million visits. One of the reason for this surge could be the rise adoption of the OpenAI LLM technology, the core of ChatGPT, and the popularity of its newest service, Copilot, which has had sign ups increase to over 800,000 in just a month.
So while it’s tough to know exactly how much of GitHub’s success is due to its embrace of ChatGPT, the stats suggest that developers are increasingly willing to embrace OpenAI technologies, which provide them with more complete versions of code and additional tutorial content to explain how it works.
Of course, Stack Overflow remains dedicated to helping techies solve their coding challenges the way it always has, through upvoting of answers and dialogue between users. However, it appears that the organization may need to adapt to the changing landscape if it wants to remain at the top of the heap.
Finally, it is important to note that ChatGPT is a company created by OpenAI, a leading research laboratory working in the field of artificial intelligence. It is also fronted by world-renowed computer scientist and OpenAI co-founder, Sam Altman.
