“Insights into Stack Overflow’s Traffic: We’re Setting the Record Straight”, 2023-08-08 ():
Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen inaccurate data and graphs circulating on social media channels regarding Stack Overflow’s traffic [decreasing due to ChatGPT]. We wanted to take the opportunity to provide additional context and information on the origin of that data, the traffic trends we are seeing, and the work we’re doing to ensure Stack Overflow remains a go-to destination for developers and technologists for years to come.
Let’s start with why the data in the graph that’s circulating is inaccurate. There were two changes we made over the last year that impact how we measure and report traffic on Stack Overflow. Both were important and necessary steps to meeting the privacy needs of our users.
First, we recategorized our Google Analytics cookie. That was completed in May 2022, and resulted in Google Analytics reporting on fewer visitors’ site activity.
Shortly after, in September 2022, we upgraded to Google Analytics 4 (GA4), which provides additional configurable privacy-enabling settings, such as anonymous modeling of site traffic, which we have enabled.
After upgrading to GA4, we didn’t update or add context to an analytics page on our site, which is only available to a small population of users with >25,000 reputation points on Stack Overflow. The chart that has been circulating was based on deprecated data accessed from this page. Our team is working to address the necessary changes.
Although we have seen a small decline in traffic, in no way is it what the graph is showing (which some have incorrectly interpreted to be a 50% or 35% decrease). This year, overall, we’re seeing an average of ~5% less traffic compared to 2022.
[This was written in August 2023, so it includes initial ChatGPT-3.5 effects (released December 2022) but as an overall average, means that GPT-4 is largely omitted or diluted out, and the real accumulating decrease is >5% and possibly much larger than that.]