Stack Overflow's plan to survive the age of AI

Stack Overflow has a plan…

For starters, last month the company resurrected chat on all Stack Overflow (And its other 180 Stack Exchange sites), wrote CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar, “in the spirit of fostering even more connections between our community members in an increasingly AI-driven world.”

Though historically it hasn’t been featured prominently on the site, the company now sees chat as “an immediate avenue for engagement beyond our typical Q&A format.”

The flagship site of the larger Stack Exchange Network, Stack Overflow has been best known for being a question-and-answer (Q&A) website for computer programmers and developers. Millions of people visited it every month to ask questions about specific programming problems, as well as to share their own technical knowledge and learn from the collective experience of the community.

But in November 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, which offered faster, if maybe not quite as accurate, answers to programming questions. The age of AI had arrived,  and site visits to StackOverflow plummeted.

Querying Stack Overflow’s official “Data Explorer” tool, the programming news site DevClass calculated that “the sum of questions and answers posted in April 2025 was down by over 64% from the same month in 2024, and plunged more than 90% from April 2020, when traffic was near its peak.”

By another estimate, user-generated questions have decreased by 77% since 2022.

For Chandrasekar, chat is one way the new Stack Overflow can stay agile — “to quickly experiment, iterate on user feedback, and then make changes to see what works best.”

And it’s just one of several steps the company taking to try to bring users back to their long-running question-and-answer sites in the age of AI.

Compensating Experts?

Last week, a blog post detailed what else is being researched by the company’s User Experience team. And another thing its actively investigating is the ability to directly consult an expert — with the possibility those experts could even be compensated in some way.

Stack Overflow’s researchers surveyed over 600 developers, and concluded that currently “help seekers” are struggling to actually get help from the site. (“Writing a good question takes too much time in today’s world especially when most don’t know how to write in the Stack Overflow quality standard. Then there is a chance they’ll either get negative feedback or won’t get an answer at all.”)

These people do see the value in AI, but it would still prefer human help, although “some are willing to rely on AI if it means getting help faster than what our site offers today.” And one thing that these users really want is help in understanding their problem…

But then Stack Overflow’s researchers said they were “pleasantly surprised” that “there were people who would be willing to participate in an expert consultation concept.” Asking 17 different people (who’d previously answered a question) if they’d want to become “expert consultants,” the researchers reported that some developers “were at least moderately interested, especially if they were compensated.”

So the idea is being pursued. “This team will be continuing to explore what this might look like, including some upcoming on-site tests.”

Personalized Home Pages

There’s more. Chandrasekar discussed “our next phase” in a late-February blog post, bringing the news that “We have come to believe that Q&A is just one piece of the puzzle…

“The new Stack Overflow will be one built to feel like a personalized homepage — your own technical aggregator. It might collect videos, blogs, Q&A, war stories, jokes, educational materials, jobs, all these formats (or maybe others, we would love to hear your ideas!), and fold them together into one personalized destination. We want this place to be your ‘third screen’ — your entry point to your own neighborhood on the internet.”

A February blog post also mentioned “news aggregation, coding workshops and challenges… Not everyone learns the same way — so let’s create content geared to all.” There’d still be upvoting and downvoting (and moderation) on the new content types (plus “other opportunities for community members to edit, rate, and build them collaboratively.”)

Another post from March added more generally that the company were already “exploring early ideas for expanding beyond the ‘single lane’ Q&A highway.” Though it hasn’t settled on specific changes yet, their vision for the future included:

• “A slower lane, with high-quality durable knowledge” (like its carefully curated question-and-answer site)
• A “medium lane” with features like Discussions or “more flexible Stack Exchanges… where users can explore ideas or share opinions.”

Chandrasekar also spoke of “modernizing the existing assets we have in place.” The research team has also promised usability tests for features like chat — and for coding challenges. It’s all proof of a conscious effort to increase the amount of research that’s being done.

Last week even saw a special “CEO Update” on Stack Overflow’s blog, promising “exploration and experimentation for bold evolution.”

How Stack Overflow Uses AI

In the meantime, AI is clearly impacting their business.

For one, AI is leading to new alliances or even licensing deals for access to Stack Overflow content. In his CEO update CEO Chandrasekar touted Stack Overflow’s strategic partnerships with Open AI, Google Cloud for Gemini, GitHub Copilot and Microsoft 365. And in April a new partnership with Moveworks also created an AI agent that can search all Stack Overflow content using natural language queries.

The CEO update included a clip of Chandrasekar promising even more deals at April’s HumanX AI conference in Las Vegas. “We will be making several more announcements over the coming weeks, where they are not only getting access to this content so they can be able to pretrain their models, etc… but also for us to be able to surface Stack Overflow data in their genAI tools.”

In a February appearance Chandrasekar also acknowledged “several more” partnerships “that we’ve done behind the scenes that are not public, only because we just have not announced them publicly. And we’re in process of doing many more of these, as companies reach out to us…”

Before 2022, Chandrasekar says in that video, AI companies “obviously leveraged a lot of the data on the open internet and discovered the value of the amazing corpus of information that we have, that all of you created.” (All Stack Overflow comments are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.)

But after 2022, “some of them reached out to us, and we reached out to some of them to say let’s formally establish a mechanism where they can license the data and also for us to be able to integrate into their tools so that we can be useful.”

One result? In 2023 Stack Overflow for Visual Studio Code was released for the Business and Enterprise tier of Stack Overflow for Teams. Stack Overflow’s annual survey had discovered 73% of developers used Visual Studio Code as their IDE, according to a promotional video.

In his CEO message, Chandrasekar calls efforts like these “democratizing access to knowledge” — and perhaps more importantly, making it happen “in all of the spaces that developers are and within the tools they use regularly.” (Enterprises are also experimenting internally with AI agents using Stack Overflow’s “high-quality, trusted data”, as Stack Overflow continues offering the licensing of “human-verified knowledge” to “build and improve AI tools and models.”)

But it’s all happening while pursuing “ethical, responsible use of data for community good and reinvestment in the communities that develop and curate these knowledge bases,” Chandrasekar wrote. He suggested later that Stack Overflow has “a pioneering role to play in shifting the conversation around the importance of attribution to our larger knowledge communities and trusted sources of data.”)

Wearing a “Not a Robot” T-shirt, Chandrasekar said in February that Stack Overflow’s surveys show an interesting paradox. While 70% of developers said they were very interested in using AI tools, “Only 40% of you trust what’s coming out of these things.”

In his CEO update, Chandrasekar argued that our current moment gives Stack Overflow “the opportunity to act as a bulwark against misinformation and the pervasive lack of trust in the content generated by GenAI tools.”

The ultimate goal is not just to allow access Stack Overflow’s content — but to also be able to post questions to Stack Overflow through AI tools. “So us as a human community can answer them, can create new knowledge, the people that do respond to those things get recognized for their expertise.

“And this new knowledge that’s being created, of course, can be used for future AI models, etc. So the world goes around… And there’s a symbiotic relationship.”

A 90% Plunge In Questions

Shortly after the first launch of ChatGPT, someone in Stack Overflow’s “meta” discussion area asked the obvious question. “Could ChatGPT be a viable way to answer people’s questions?”

It was downvoted 26 times — and raising this uncomfortable topic became the only question that one user ever dared to ask…

But there may be hope. DevClass’s article notes that Stack Overflow’s overall business, owned by investment company Prosus, includes more than just question-and-answer boards. It encompasses products including “private versions of its site (Stack Overflow for Teams) as well as advertising and recruitment.” Licensing deals presumably factor into those statistics somewhere, and importantly, “according to the Prosus financial results, in the six months ended September 2024, Stack Overflow increased its revenue and reduced its losses…”

Could its continually diversifying portfolio help it survive the age of AI after all?

Correction: A previous version of this post misidentified the location of the 2025 HumanX  conference. It was held in Las Vegas.