The Dead Internet Report

The Dead Internet ReportSix corners of the web AI is switching off.Famous corners of the internet are going quiet as AI answers the questions, makes the images, and does the small jobs people used to come for. This is a running series that measures those collapses — each one anchored to public, recomputable data, each number something you can pull yourself. No estimates, no vibes.Every figure recomputableEach number here is a query away — a public API, a stock ticker, a pageviews feed. Pull it and check us.One honest window, not the scariest oneStocks carry bubbles, SPACs, a failed merger; Quora is private. We fence off every confounder and anchor each collapse to its cleanest defensible AI-era number.We cut what didn't holdDigg and Tumblr were on the list. The data said their declines weren't AI — Digg's interest even grew — so they aren't here.The seriesSix collapses, one causeFive domains of the human web — developer Q&A, homework, stock imagery, freelance work, general Q&A — plus the giant that sued. Each report measures one collapse from a source you can re-query.The honest fine print. Three of these are share prices, which carry more than AI: we throw away the 2021 bubble peaks, flag Getty's SPAC debut, and fence off the failed Getty–Shutterstock merger, anchoring each to the cleanest pre-confounder window. Quora is privately held, so we measure public search interest, not traffic, and say so at every turn. Where a number could be read two ways, each report shows both and tells you which one we lead with.The authorWritten by Hesham MashhourFounder, HarperFlowAbout HeshamA University of Cambridge graduate and medical doctor turned creator — his YouTube channel NeuroEverything has grown past 40,000 subscribers breaking down brain science. He later turned automation engineer, building content pipelines for founders and creators who'd rather build than market. He started HarperFlow on one conviction: great ideas deserve exposure, and the people best at building things usually have the least time to promote them. He writes from the workbench — HarperFlow runs its own pipeline, on its own blog, first.Check our workEvery number, from a public source you can queryNo dashboard. No private panel.You don't need our spreadsheet — you need the same open feeds we used. Every figure in the series comes from one of three public sources, and each report names which one it leans on.Stack Exchange API · new questions per month · Part 1Yahoo Finance · monthly closing price · Parts 2 · 3 · 4 · 6Wikimedia Pageviews API · monthly article pageviews · Part 5Pull the Stack Exchange question total for the stackoverflow tag month by month; hit the Yahoo Finance monthly-chart endpoint for CHGG, SSTK, FVRR and GETY; query the Wikimedia pageviews API for the Quora article. Same inputs, same numbers. If you recompute a figure and get a different answer, we want to hear about it.Prefer not to pull them yourself? Download the full bundle — six CSVs, a README, and verify.py, which re-pulls the live sources and asserts every dated anchor figure, exiting non-zero if anything has drifted.Download the dataset →Does AI answer for you — or instead of you?Every site in this series was a place people went for something AI now provides directly. The businesses that survive the shift are the ones AI answers cite and send people to. Run a free GEO audit and find out which side of that line you're on.The takeaway for anyone publishing is the one behind how we think about AI and Webflow content: generation is cheap, but only cited, checked work survives.Run the free audit →