While lots of marketing people continue to argue on LinkedIn about whether or not AI search is real, we're starting to see some of the grim reality of it. It's clear that different industries are adopting AI at different rates, but far and way AI has taken over software development. To date the-

major case study for the impact of AI search on traditional search has been StackOverflow, which seen a 78% decline in questions asked over the past year. However, StackOverflow has simultaneously been dying of self inflicted wounds for a long time, so it been a shaky indicator of the broader-

impact of AI search. This week however Tailwind (a much beloved CSS framework) announced layoffs of 75% of their staff as a direct result of AI search disruption. Their business model has been: 1. Developers try and use Tailwind 2. They run into issues 3. They search for solutions like "how do-

style text inputs with Tailwind" 4. Tailwind's awesome and incredibly helpful docs site dominates these searches. 5. Developers visit the docs site and get both help, but also exposed to buying their paid products However, with the rise of AI they're being cut in two ways: - People are getting-

answers to their questions in tools like ChatGPT, Claude or Google's AI Overviews, greatly decreasing their docs traffic ("search migration"). - Developers are increasingly using tools that just directly solve these problems, reducing demand for their paid products ("search evaporation").