Stack Overflow went from 300,000 questions/month to almost 0 after ChatGPT launched, and yet its revenue is now up 2x to $115 million 😳

Shortly after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, the internet’s most important developer forum basically stopped being used.

And yet Stack Overflow’s revenue doubled, and is now at $115M/year.

How? Instead of fighting AI, Stack Overflow sold itself to AI.

Here’s how they pulled off one of the wildest pivots in tech 👇

While developers stopped asking questions, AI companies started buying answers.

15+ years of human-crafted answers.

58M+ Q&A pairs.

Millions of real bugs.

Edge cases.

War stories.

The internet’s highest-quality coding dataset, so Stack Overflow licensed it.

And then they did the smartest move of all.

They stopped chasing public traffic and went inside companies.

Launched “Stack Internal”, a private GenAI tool trained on Stack Overflow’s knowledge, plugged directly into enterprise workflows.

Private. Secure. Inside companies.

Used by 25,000+ organisations already.

Not a forum.

Not a community.

An internal AI brain for developers 🧠

Here’s the uncomfortable truth:

The internet’s open knowledge era is collapsing.

Not because knowledge vanished.

But because it got privatized.

Volunteers built it for free.

AI monetizes it at scale.

And that’s the biggest lesson for every platform, founder, and creator:

Data is the ultimate moat now.

If you own high-quality data, you have leverage.

If you don’t, you’re feeding someone who does.