The internet as we've known it is dead. Not in a catastrophic way, but in a fundamental shift that has rendered old metrics of online success obsolete. For decades, the primary measure of an online entity's value has been traffic—the sheer volume of users clicking, visiting, and engaging with a website. This paradigm was built on a model of scarcity, where information was a destination, and those who amassed the most visitors won.
We face a world in which the old paradigms of how information is created, accessed, and shared are fast becoming obsolete due to the rise of AI in the last few years. Companies and organizations that host engines of knowledge production are at a crucial decision point; how do they evolve when the technological landscapes have changed around them? A significant shift in strategy allows these companies, AI tools, and the communities and data sets that power them to thrive.
The rise of Generative AI has dramatically redefined the information ecosystem, and with it, the very nature of success. When a user can get an instant, synthesized answer from an AI chatbot, the old quest for web traffic becomes a fool's errand. We see it in the declining use of traditional search and the increasing reliance on AI overviews. The question is no longer "How do we get more people to our site?" but rather…
"What is the new measure of value in an AI-driven world?"
The new success metrics aren't about eyeballs or clicks; they're about reach, trust, attribution, and influence.
In the post GenAI era, a new set of Internet business models emerged: in this new Internet era, businesses that understand that human knowledge and its creation, curation, and validation are as valuable (or more so) than the awareness or engagement of users themselves. We can't measure the success of a modern knowledge platform by the digital equivalent of foot traffic in a mall, or the number of newspapers delivered to a driveway. That's a relic of a bygone era. Those old models of commerce needed to shift and evolve, and in this new world, success in the modern internet is defined by:
- Knowledge as a Service (KaaS): The ability to not just host information, but to provide it in a structured, validated, and continuously updated format that can power the next generation of AI tools and engage the user wherever they are in their workflow. Success is measured by the strategic value of your data to other platforms, not just to your own.
- API Partnerships: The depth and reach of integrations with leading AI labs and hyperscalers. When our data helps improve a 7b Mistral model's accuracy by 30% to 70%, that's a tangible metric of success. It also means Stack Overflow for example now reaches even more developers as part of those ecosystems.
- The Human-Validated Layer: The quality of the human intelligence that fuels AI systems, whether on the public internet or inside the enterprise. In a world of "AI slop" and hallucinations, a platform's success is tied to its ability to provide a trusted layer of verified, human-contributed knowledge that AI can depend on to remain useful and accurate.
The last few years of GenAI technologies have given publishing, content and community platforms a pause to rethink user interactions as AI's ability to provide direct answers is leading to a decline in traditional web traffic. This is because users can get the information they need without having to click through to a publisher's site. To adapt to this new environment, publishers are building direct relationships with their audience, diversifying their content, and exploring new solutions that incorporate AI. To succeed and thrive in this age one must be ready to disrupt your own business models.
The last three years have been transformative for us as a company and an exercise in adaptation and diversification in order to thrive as a business while continuing to serve technologists, wherever they may be. We recently launched the evolution of our enterprise product, Stack Internal. Introduced originally in 2018 as Stack Overflow for Teams, Stack Internal acts as an enterprise knowledge layer, ingesting, validating, and delivering organizational knowledge directly within the tools developers and technologists use everyday with the powerful duo of AI and human-validated content, while ensuring that teams can stay focused on accelerating innovation and avoid cognitive overload. With powerful new features such as Knowledge Ingestion that draws high value content from the tools enterprise tools developers use every day and transforms it into a structured format, and our bidirectional MCP Server that uses AI agents to pull from and contribute to an enterprise knowledge base, Stack Internal counts over 20,000 customers across the financial services, technology, retail, and telecommunications sectors. Our public platform also recently debuted its own MCP Server that was created to help technologists debug and solve their problems faster - all that is needed is a Stack Overflow account and a MCP-compatible client to begin retrieving our trusted, human-verified content directly within AI agents and IDEs.
During the first half of 2023 as we all witnessed the explosive growth of AI technology, we began to evaluate how we could continue to bring value to technologists in a new era of the internet. With over 17 years of trusted and verified technical knowledge from our public platform, our Data Licensing product was created to support enterprises with their AI initiatives and training and fine-tuning their LLM models. Joining forces with the likes of OpenAI, Google, Snowflake, Moveworks, Databricks, and other hyperscalers in the space, we’ve been able to help our partners strengthen their AI pilots and deepen their models’ context awareness and reasoning power. As the technology industry experienced a seismic shift around us and the markers of success have changed, self-reflection and agile decision making as a business is necessary in order to meet the moment.
Meeting that moment also means attracting and serving the right audience - the goal is no longer racing to attract the most online traffic. When it comes to customer fit, AI helps us move beyond simply acquiring customers to identifying and attracting those who will truly thrive with our products or services, leading to significantly better retention. This is why at Stack Overflow we are so heavily focused on working directly with our public platform users and enterprise customers to develop features that actually benefit them and their day to day needs. That is how you generate customer lifetime value. AI can identify early customer behaviors that signal long-term loyalty, shifting our focus from raw acquisition numbers to nurturing customer relationships and growth based on personalization.
If you’ve been following our journey, you know we’re evolving Stack Overflow’s platform experience to reflect the way developers now operate. For example, rather than expecting users to search for information from our large corpus of more than 80 million questions and answers, we’re integrating Stack Overflow’s verified answers into an AI-powered, conversational search and discovery tool, AI Assist. This approach brings together the best of both worlds for developers: AI’s speedy summarization and the community’s expertise, presented side-by-side. Ultimately creating an AI assistant that brings together the power of AI and the trustworthy, human-validated content on our site with attribution. We’ve also introduced chat and community features that allow for real-time collaboration that allow developers to drop in, get feedback, and stay in flow. These updates align with how today’s devs prefer to work: quick touchpoints of connection that provide immediate insights.
We have actively disrupted ourselves to embrace AI as an interaction mode and have seen a tremendous response from our users with thousands leveraging the new AI functionality to learn and grow. With today’s GA launch of AI Assist we showcase that the workflow of the modern technologist has drastically changed beyond our original offerings. AI Assist is showing diverse usage, with more than 285,000 technologists around the world leveraging it across a number of tasks ranging from understanding error messages, to debugging code, to comparing different libraries, to even getting help architecting apps. Power users are creating up to 6400 messages daily with 75% of their focus on the highly technical content that has been the standard of Stack Overflow since its inception.
To support upskilling, we launched Coding Challenges that make learning feel less like homework and more like gaming. These are bite-sized, competitive, and social—perfect for developers raised on YouTube tutorials and coding livestreams. By bringing together quality data and human experience to create sustainable, vital communities, we can build the future of the internet together that drives innovation and growth for all.This is a profound shift. Large language models aren't "thinking" or inventing ideas; they are synthesizing existing information. They are regurgitating the knowledge we humans have provided. The real value, therefore, lies not in the regurgitation, but in the original act of thinking and creating. Who is doing the thinking? Who is proving the value? That's what matters now. The quality and creativity developed by humans is still unmatched.
This brings us to the most critical currency of the post-GenAI era: Attribution.
In a world where AI agents and chatbots are the new front door to knowledge, a critical vulnerability is exposed: without a clear link to the authoritative source, trust deteriorates. When fabricated news stories or inaccurate facts make their way into the public sphere through AI, it's a clear signal that the system is breaking.
This is our call to arms. For the sake of a sustainable, useful, and trustworthy AI future, we must demand that AI players tell users where information came from and how it can be trusted. This is about more than just a citation; it's about making sure the human creators who are fueling this new era are recognized and respected. If you are worried about where your information is coming from, ask the AI provider if they are practicing socially responsible AI practices.
The new world is defined by AI, and it isn't about SEO, traffic, or any single piece of content anymore. It's about attribution of knowledge both on the public internet and within the enterprise. Let's build a future where we all get to see who is doing the thinking.