Stack Overflow is ChatGPT Casualty: Traffic Down 14% in March

Developers increasingly get advice from AI chatbots and GitHub CoPilot rather than Stack Overflow message boards

While traffic to OpenAI’s ChatGPT has been growing exponentially, Stack Overflow has been experiencing a steady decline – losing some of its standings as the go-to source developers turn to for answers to coding challenges.

Actually, traffic to Stack Overflow’s community website has been dropping since the beginning of 2022. That may be in part because of a related development, the introduction of the CoPilot coding assistant from Microsoft’s GitHub business. CoPilot is built on top of the same OpenAI large language model as ChatGPT, capable of processing both human language and programming language.

A plugin to the widely used Microsoft Visual Studio Code allows developers to have CoPilot write entire functions on their behalf, rather than going to Stack Overflow in search of something to copy and paste. CoPilot now incorporates the latest GPT-4 version of OpenAI’s platform.

Key takeaways

• On a year-over-year basis, traffic to Stack Overflow (stackoverflow.com) has been down by an average of 6% every month since January 2022 and was down 13.9% in March.
• ChatGPT doesn’t have a year-over-year track record, having only launched at the end of November, but its website (chat.openai.com) has become one of the world’s hottest digital properties in that short time, bigger than Microsoft’s Bing search engine for worldwide traffic. It attracted 1.6 billion visits in March and another 920.7 million in the first half of April.
• The GitHub website has also been seeing strong growth, with traffic to github.com up 26.4% year-over-year in March to 524 million visits. That doesn’t reflect all the usage of CoPilot, which normally takes place within an editor like Visual Studio Code, but it would include people coming to the website to get a subscription to the service.
• Visits to the GitHub CoPilot free trial signup page more than tripled from February to March, topping 800,000.

ChatGPT as a coding tool

Soon after the introduction of ChatGPT, developers discovered that one of the things it was useful for was producing detailed code samples and complete functions – with accompanying tutorial content explaining why the code works – in response to a simple text prompt. The comparisons with Stack Overflow and predictions that ChatGPT would “kill” Stack Overflow started immediately.

Meanwhile, Stack Overflow announced a temporary ban on posting ChatGPT content to its site – considered a violation of community standards because, according to the site’s management, ChatGPT’s answers to coding questions are too often incorrect. (Update: In a blog post, Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar discusses how his team plans to combine the best of community and generative AI technologies going forward.)

The Stack Overflow tradition is that community members post a variety of answers to any given coding question, debate the advantages and tradeoffs, and vote to recognize the best solution. For many common coding questions, a developer will find a widely recognized best answer waiting for them.

ChatGPT users miss out on the debate and just get an answer, which can seem quicker and more efficient. The answer that comes back may not be exactly what the developer needs but is often close enough to be shaped and tweaked into a working solution. That’s not so different from the process of finding an answer to someone else’s question on Stack Overflow and adapting it to your own requirements.

CoPilot has been the subject of controversy over code generation based on open source content, without respect to the relevant open source licenses (see this Wikipedia summary), and those issues also apply to coding advice provided by ChatGPT. In addition, it’s likely that some of OpenAI’s accumulated wisdom on coding techniques comes from digesting content on Stack Overflow and similar sites.

How Stack Overflow and GitHub compare with ChatGPT

Most websites suffer by comparison with ChatGPT these days, and this is not a fair comparison in the sense that Stack Overflow and GitHub are specialized services for developers. ChatGPT has gained mass market appeal, in addition to being useful to developers.

GitHub is growing, and Stack Overflow is shrinking

While Stack Overflow and GitHub are a lot closer to each other in size than they are to ChatGPT, GitHub is growing its traffic while Stack Overflow is shrinking. We can’t say how much of GitHub’s growth is related to its embrace (and Microsoft’s broader embrace) of OpenAI technologies, but the related buzz is probably helping.

CoPilot signups just tripled

GitHub provides many free services, but CoPilot is one of its paid features – and popular enough that free trial signups for the service tripled between February and March.

From copy-and-paste to prompt engineering

For years, Stack Overflow has been such a useful resource for coders that it spawned a million nerd jokes about coding skills being replaced by the ability to copy-and-paste code snippets from the service. While the issues of code quality and intellectual property around ChatGPT code generation continue to swirl, the pivot away from searching and posting questions on Stack Overflow seems to have already occurred. The new lazy-but-efficient coding trick is to prompt ChatGPT, CoPilot, or Bing Chat to write big chunks of code for you.

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Report By: David F. Carr, Senior Insights Manager

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