[lph]

The graphs in the post show the traffic decline starting around May 2022, months before ChatGPT was available. I'd wager the cause is a change in Google's algorithm. Most of the time I end up on Stack Overflow, it's because I've typed a question into a search engine.

[consp]

The top search resuls used to be either a SO answer, or a forum post or the actual docs having the answer to the question. These days it's either a dupe site copy pasting ad verbatim, a recurgitated and slightly modified variant of the former, or a "AI" generated answer, all full of ads. And to make it worse, none of them are useful as they obfuscate the answer or are simply wrong.

Looks like Google started to prioritise ads even more than actual useful results is what changed mostly.

[coffeebeqn]

Anecdotally it seems like Google is favoring spam sites that have crawled answers from SO

[redsaber]

I had to use ublock origin to start blocking those sites

https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter

[tylerneylon]

Oh, you're right about the timing. It's probably not ChatGPT.