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Stack Overflow's Own API Counts 969 Questions From September 2026, Down From 141,728 in September 2020
Stack Exchange's public API, asked for every Stack Overflow question still on the site from September 2026, returns 969, against 5,072 for September 2025 and 141,728 for September 2020, a drop of more than 99 percent in six years.
The whole story fits in one number, and the number comes from Stack Overflow’s own front door. The API’s /questions method “gets all the questions on the site,” filtered by the date each was asked, and adding filter=total makes it return a single count instead of the posts.
For September 2026, that count is 969. September 2025: 5,072. September 2020: 141,728. That’s 81 percent gone in one year and more than 99 percent in six. October is tracking the same way, with 978 questions from October 1 through 29 as of October 30.
There’s one wrinkle, and it cuts toward a smaller gap, not a bigger one. The API only counts what’s still on the site, so a question deleted later doesn’t show up. The 2020 posts have had six years to be cleaned up by moderators and their own askers, and the 2026 ones barely a month. The 969 can still shrink.
The slide has a shape. The same call gives 207,169 questions for March 2014, 182,820 for April 2020, and 105,743 for October 2022. ChatGPT launched on November 30, 2022. A year later, October 2023 came in at 52,334, about half. October 2024 halved again, to 23,161, and October 2025 fell to 5,263.
The developers didn’t stop needing help. Stack Overflow’s own 2025 Developer Survey found “84% of respondents are using or planning to use AI tools in their development process, an increase over last year (76%).” The same survey found “more developers actively distrust the accuracy of AI tools (46%) than trust it (33%).” The survey doesn’t ask whether that’s why people quit posting, but the steepest halvings came in the years right after ChatGPT arrived.
What nobody can see from the API is where those answers are being checked now.
Expect the count to keep sliding toward a few hundred a month, with what’s left skewing toward the questions AI tools get wrong: brand-new releases, odd hardware, and bugs nobody’s written about yet. The thing to watch is whether Stack Overflow can make those questions its whole business, or whether the place that answered a generation of programming questions ends up as an archive.