Famous corners of the internet are going quiet as AI answers the questions, makes the images, and does the small jobs people used to come for. This is a running series that measures those collapses — each one anchored to public, recomputable data, each number something you can pull yourself. No estimates, no vibes.
Each number here is a query away — a public API, a stock ticker, a pageviews feed. Pull it and check us.
Stocks carry bubbles, SPACs, a failed merger; Quora is private. We fence off every confounder and anchor each collapse to its cleanest defensible AI-era number.
Digg and Tumblr were on the list. The data said their declines weren't AI — Digg's interest even grew — so they aren't here.
Five domains of the human web — developer Q&A, homework, stock imagery, freelance work, general Q&A — plus the giant that sued. Each report measures one collapse from a source you can re-query.
New developer questions per month fell from 109,301 the month ChatGPT launched to 1,624 — a 98.5% collapse in the human Q&A that trained the machines.
The homework giant lost half its value the morning after it named ChatGPT on an earnings call — $96.53 down to 98 cents, below the delisting line.
It licensed its library to OpenAI and shipped its own generator — and generative image AI commoditized stock photography anyway.
Gig work didn't crash on launch day. Fiverr held flat for two years, then fell 71% as the models finally got good enough to do the tasks.
The place you went to ask a human. Public search interest fell 43% as ChatGPT began answering the exact questions Quora was built for.
Getty took Stability AI to court in two countries — and lost the case and 98.6% of its value. You can't litigate your way out of a capability shift.
You don't need our spreadsheet — you need the same open feeds we used. Every figure in the series comes from one of three public sources, and each report names which one it leans on.
Pull the Stack Exchange question total for the stackoverflow tag month by month; hit the Yahoo Finance monthly-chart endpoint for CHGG, SSTK, FVRR and GETY; query the Wikimedia pageviews API for the Quora article. Same inputs, same numbers. If you recompute a figure and get a different answer, we want to hear about it.
Prefer not to pull them yourself? Download the full bundle — six CSVs, a README, and verify.py, which re-pulls the live sources and asserts every dated anchor figure, exiting non-zero if anything has drifted.
Every site in this series was a place people went for something AI now provides directly. The businesses that survive the shift are the ones AI answers cite and send people to. Run a free GEO audit and find out which side of that line you're on.
The takeaway for anyone publishing is the one behind how we think about AI and Webflow content: generation is cheap, but only cited, checked work survives.
Run the free audit →