You are correct here. This graph on SO traffic is outdated and inaccurate. Apologies, when we changed how we measure and report on traffic - we didn’t update or add context to this page (since May 10, 2022). We are currently working to resolve the issue.

Was poking around at this. SO Staff member Catija mentions a cookie tracking change that rolled out in April/May 2022, so that could explain what's counted as a "visit" from http://stackoverflow.com/site-analytics vs. SimilarWeb's extrapolated data that doesn't depend on cookie consent Link: [https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/391624/correlation-between-ai-generated-content-and-the-demise-of-se-so/391625#comment1309277_391625](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/391624/correlation-between-ai-generated-content-and-the-demise-of-se-so/391625#comment1309277_391625)

Some colleagues and I have been studying the impact of ChatGPT on SO using data on posts, not views: [https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.07367](https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.07367) Besides a big decrease after ChatGPT, we observe a completely flat 2022, and earlier a big bump in activity during early Covid.