Key takeaways
- Stack Overflow question volume is down roughly 78% year over year as of late 2025, and developer marketers can no longer assume their community answers are the primary source AI assistants pull from.
- GitHub's citation share on ChatGPT Search is small but rising (0.23% to 0.27% between May and June 2026), while Reddit still dwarfs both at 3.71% to 6.11% depending on the month, and can collapse by 86% in days.
- ChatGPT began running site-scoped
site:searches at scale on August 8, 2026, meaning your own site's internal search and crawlability now matter more than they did six months ago. - No off-the-shelf report isolates Stack Overflow and GitHub citation trends specifically, so dev marketing teams need to build custom tracking rather than rely on generic domain rankings.
- A combination of crawler-log monitoring, prompt-level tracking, and old-fashioned social listening on Stack Overflow and GitHub itself gets you closest to a complete picture.
Why this is suddenly a real job, not a side project
For a decade, if a developer had a question about your API, they typed it into Google, landed on a Stack Overflow thread, and either found the answer or asked it themselves. That flow is breaking. Stack Overflow's own community has been sounding the alarm for a while: a Meta Stack Overflow thread tracking the platform's health shows daily questions asked dropped from over 6,700 a day at the 2014 peak to 88 a day in February 2026, and 42 a day by May. DevClass reported only 3,862 questions were posted in December 2025, a 78% year-over-year drop, with developers moving their