AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving - let's look at the data
Traffic trends from WebMD, Quora, Stack Overflow, Chegg, G2, CNET, Reddit, Wikipedia, and Substack!
AI is quietly upending the business models of major content sites. Platforms like WebMD, G2, and Chegg - once fueled by SEO and ad revenue - are losing traffic as AI-powered search and chatbots deliver instant answers. Users no longer need to click through pages when AI summarizes everything in seconds. Brian Balfour calls this phenomenon Product-Market Fit Collapse, a fitting term, marking it as the next big shift in tech.
Key milestones accelerating this shift:
📅 Nov 30, 2022 – ChatGPT launches
📅 Mar 14, 2023 – GPT-4 released
📅 May 14, 2024 – Google rolls out AI Overviews
❗Disclaimer: I'm simply observing traffic trends from an external perspective and don’t have insight into the exact factors driving them. The timing aligns with AI, but like any business, multiple factors are at play and each case is unique.
→ The data comes from SEMRush. If you want access to trend reports like the one below, you can try it for free.
Let's see who's losing traffic
WebMD: Where every symptom leads to cancer. They're crashing and burning and the timing aligns with major AI releases. If they don’t launch AI agents (like yesterday), they’re in trouble. That said, they still pull in ~90M visits a month.
Quora: Once the go-to platform where user-generated questions got a mix of expert insights and absolute nonsense - is struggling. And it’s no surprise. AI now delivers faster, (usually) more reliable answers. Yet, despite the challenges, Quora still pulls in just under 1 billion visits a month.
Stack Overflow: The Q&A platform for developers, is now facing seemingly direct competition from ChatGPT, which can generate and debug code instantly. As AI takes over, the community is fading - but they still attract around 200M visits a month.
Chegg: A popular platform for students - now getting schooled by AI. Weirdly, they’re fighting back by suing Google over AI snippets. Not sure what they expect… Google controls the traffic and that’s the risk of relying on someone else’s distribution.
G2: A software review platform, is experiencing huge drop in traffic levels. This one is so rough.
CNET: A technology news and reviews website is experiencing 70% traffic drop from 4 years ago. They still pull in 50 million visits per month - an impressive volume - but a steep drop from the 150 million they once had.
But not all is bad!
Just look at Reddit. Many say they are impacted, but traffic says otherwise - they are CRUSHING it. Probably because people are gravitating toward authentic content and a sense of community. I know I cannot go a day without a Reddit scroll (/r/LinkedInLunatics alone is worth visiting on the daily). And look at the y-axis: their traffic is in the billions!
And even Wikipedia is managing to stay afloat (although research AI tools will probably hit it pretty hard). Also, over 5B visits a month - consider me impressed.
And you know who else is growing? Substack. User-generated content FTW.
Good reads on the topic
Tomasz Tunguz: What Happened to My Traffic
Brian Balfour: Product Market Fit Collapse - Why Your Company Could be Next
Mine: The future of SEO is User Generated Content
Edited by Melissa Halim
Reddit has a $60M contract with Google to stay afloat - it's a pay to play game (they earn on both fronts)
What's interesting about stack overflow is that it is one of the few compilations of errors and failures. The fail fast mindset or failure is cost in most skill spaces, means that failures are not recorded and certainly not published. This means that LLMs are only train on successes which is not a real model of the world.