How far did your Stack Overflow tag fall?
Weekly new questions for the largest Stack Overflow tags, compared with what each tag's own pre-2022 trend predicted after ChatGPT (November 2022). Data: Stack Exchange data dump, cut-off 30 September 2026.
Where it ranks
Each dot is one of the largest tags: its average change against its own trend, December 2022 – September 2026. Further left fell more.
How this is calculated
For each of the 300 largest tags of 2019–21, a hierarchical negative binomial model fits monthly questions from 2017 with the tag's own trend and seasonality, then measures how far each month after ChatGPT sits from that trend extended forward. The headline number is the average monthly gap, December 2022 – September 2026, with a 95% interval. The model pools small tags toward the average, so their estimates are steadier than their raw counts. Three tags that Stack Overflow retired or merged are excluded, leaving 297. The dashed line is the trend's expected weekly questions (monthly estimate ÷ weeks).
Read the trend number with care for fast-growing tags. The trend is extended four years past 2022, so a tag that was growing quickly before ChatGPT (Flutter, Next.js, PyTorch) gets an expected line that keeps climbing, and its gap looks larger. The plain 2021 → 2025 count change needs no trend; most large tags fell 89–98% on that measure. Where the two disagree, the ranking depends on the trend assumption.
Tags first used after September 2021 have no pre-ChatGPT history, so they get no trend line. Their number compares them with how earlier new tags grew at the same age (a "lifecycle benchmark"). It is a different yardstick, and the two kinds of number shouldn't be compared directly.
Tags are as they were when each question was asked. Deleted questions are not in the dump. This shows each tag against its own past, not against other sites; the full analysis is in the project repository.