1% of Stack Overflow Carries 59% of Its Google Traffic. Google Is Cutting the Rest.

Everyone assumes AI is killing Stack Overflow. The reasoning seems obvious: if developers can ask ChatGPT instead of searching Google, fewer people click through to SO. The data tells a stranger story.

Stack Overflow's US organic traffic is roughly where it was in early 2022. What did change is what sits underneath. Google removed millions of keywords from SO's index, deindexed hundreds of thousands of pages, and pushed the site to position 2 on thousands of SERPs. None of this moved the traffic needle. Because almost all of SO's traffic was already concentrated in a tiny fraction of pages.

The Concentration

Stack Overflow has roughly 59 million questions. How many of those actually receive organic search traffic from Google in the US?

Read that bottom row again. 6,988 pages. Out of 700,797 with any organic ranking at all. Out of 59 million total questions. That 1% carries 2.6 million of the site's 4.4 million US organic visits.

The distribution within that 1% is even more extreme. Only 28 pages get 5,000+ monthly visits. Only 414 get over 1,000. The majority of "surviving" pages pull between 100 and 500 visits a month.

Four hundred and fourteen pages. That's the real Stack Overflow, as far as Google is concerned. Everything else is rounding error.

The Keyword Collapse That Didn't Collapse Traffic

Here's the number that should be alarming but isn't: Stack Overflow's total keyword rankings in the US dropped from 8.25 million to 1.11 million since February 2022. That's an 87% decline. On any other site, that would be a death sentence.

On Stack Overflow, traffic barely moved.

The loss is almost entirely in positions 11 and beyond. These are pages that ranked on page 2, page 3, page 15 of Google results. Pages that drove close to zero clicks. Google removed Stack Overflow from millions of long-tail SERPs where it wasn't useful, while keeping it in the top spots where people actually click.

Top 3 rankings dropped only 21%. The core inventory is intact. Google didn't downrank Stack Overflow. It trimmed the dead weight.

What Survived: Git Commands and Python Basics

The pages still pulling real traffic from Google aren't random. They follow a pattern.

US, Feb 2026. Sorted by estimated traffic.

Git operations. Python syntax. Package manager commands. Error messages. Docker troubleshooting. These aren't conceptual questions or opinion-seeking queries. They're operational commands where a wrong answer breaks something.

By topic, the traffic breakdown across the top 13,884 pages (those with 50+ monthly visits) clusters heavily:

Python and Git alone account for a third of all surviving traffic. These topics have something in common: the answers are deterministic. git branch -d feature-x either deletes the branch or it doesn't. There's no subjective nuance. There's no "it depends." The community-verified answer on Stack Overflow is still the safest place for Google to send users.

SERP Features: The Position 2 Problem

We filtered Stack Overflow's /questions/ pages to only those where SERP features (AI Overviews, featured snippets, discussion boxes) appear on the results page. The shift is clear.

When SERP features show up, Stack Overflow's position 1 rate drops from 45% to 6%. Google takes the answer, formats it, and gives it to the user without a click. Stack Overflow becomes the backup. The page users scroll past the AI-generated answer to reach, if they reach it at all.

This is a controlled arrangement. Google isn't removing SO from these SERPs. It's keeping it as the verification layer. The source the AI answer was probably derived from. But the traffic split has changed. Google gets the easy clicks. Stack Overflow gets the skeptical ones.

The Deindexing

The number of Stack Overflow pages appearing in Google's index with organic rankings started falling in mid-2025 and hasn't stopped.

The Top Pages charts tell the story through the gap between organic pages (how many pages rank) and organic traffic (how many visits those pages generate).

At traffic ≥ 1: 261,822 pages remain in the index. That means roughly 440,000 pages that previously ranked now show zero estimated organic traffic. Google either deindexed them or pushed them so far down they no longer register.

At traffic ≥ 10: only 54,850 pages. The organic pages line on this chart shows a sharp decline starting around August 2025, while the organic traffic line holds steady or even ticks up slightly.

At traffic ≥ 100: 6,988 pages. The page count drops but the traffic line is flat. Google is removing pages from the index without losing the traffic those pages weren't generating anyway.

Why SO Survived When Tech Media Didn't

In a separate analysis, we found that ten major tech publications lost 58% of their combined US organic traffic since 2024. Digital Trends dropped 97%. ZDNet dropped 90%. These are catastrophic declines.

Stack Overflow, over the same period, stayed essentially flat. So did other developer reference sites.

US organic traffic, monthly estimates. Peak = highest month from Feb 2022 to date.

The pattern: developer Q&A and reference documentation held. Tech editorial collapsed. Why?

Three Structural Differences

Verifiability. Stack Overflow answers can be tested. Copy the code, run it, see if it works. Tech editorial is opinion dressed as analysis. AI can replicate opinion. It can't replicate "this code compiles and produces the correct output," backed by community upvotes from people who actually ran it.

Canonical authority. For "git delete branch," there is one correct procedure. Stack Overflow's answer has been tested by millions of developers. Google has no reason to replace this with a generated answer because the generated answer would be derived from this page anyway. For "best laptop 2026," there is no canonical answer. AI can synthesize that just as well as a human reviewer.

Risk profile. If an AI Overview gives you a slightly wrong laptop recommendation, you buy a slightly wrong laptop. If it gives you a slightly wrong git command, you might delete your production branch. Google keeps SO visible for queries where hallucination has real consequences.

What This Means

For Developers

Stack Overflow isn't dying. It's consolidating. The site's value to Google is concentrated in a small number of canonical answers to operational questions. If you're searching for something where the answer is a specific command or code snippet, SO will keep showing up. If you're searching for architectural advice, framework comparisons, or "should I use X or Y" questions, AI is already eating that. Those are the pages Google deindexed.

For Content Creators

The traffic concentration data is a warning. Stack Overflow had 59 million pages of content. Google cares about 7,000 of them. The lesson isn't "create less content." It's "understand that most content will eventually get zero organic traffic, and plan accordingly." Build around the canonical answers in your space. Don't build around the long tail.

For SEOs Watching Their Keyword Counts

An 87% keyword decline looks apocalyptic in a dashboard. Stack Overflow shows that keyword count and traffic can decouple completely. If your keywords are in positions 11 or beyond, they're already dead. Losing them from your ranking report is Google catching up to reality, not a new penalty. Tools that track keyword counts without weighting by traffic are missing the real picture.

Yuval Halevi

Helping SaaS companies and developer tools get cited in AI answers since before it was called "GEO." 10+ years in B2B SEO, 50+ cybersecurity and SaaS tools clients.