If you've been following our recent posts on the changing landscape of online search and why paid social is failing to reach developers, you already know the punchline: channels marketers have relied on for years are losing ground with technical audiences. But knowing that attention has shifted isn't the same as knowing where it went and why.
"84% of developers now use AI tools"
We dug into the three largest annual developer surveys available, along with platform-level data from GitHub and Stack Overflow, to build a clear picture of how developer workflows, habits, and information sources are changing as AI tooling becomes embedded into our lives. If you're a marketing leader trying to reach this audience, these are the numbers that should be shaping your strategy.
What We’ll Cover:
- Why you should stop paying more to reach fewer developers - zero-click search, AI Overviews, and declining Q&A engagement are eroding the channels marketers have relied on most.
- Contextual ads in developer editorial environments work - ads embedded in developer-focused content perform because developers chose to be there, not because an algorithm served them.
- Newsletters deserve a central role in your media mix - loyal, self-selected audiences in a high-attention format make sponsorships uniquely effective, especially in fast-growing AI niches.
- Start building brand recognition now, before AI decides for developers - as AI tools increasingly surface and recommend products, the brands developers already know will win, making awareness campaigns more important than ever.
AI Isn't a Novelty Anymore. It's the Default.
Let's start with the headline figure. According to the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 84% of developers are now using or planning to use AI tools in their development process, up from 76% in 2024 and 70% in 2023. That three-year trend line tells you everything: AI tool adoption among developers isn't accelerating slowly. It's compounding.
But the more telling statistic is about daily usage. The same survey found that 51% of professional developers now use AI tools every single day. JetBrains' 2025 State of Developer Ecosystem report paints a similar picture, with 85% of developers regularly using AI tools for coding and development and 62% relying on at least one AI coding assistant, agent, or code editor.
This isn't casual experimentation. Developers have woven AI into the fabric of their daily work. GitHub Copilot alone surpassed 20 million cumulative users by mid-2025, a fourfold increase in just one year. The tool now generates an average of 46% of all code written by its active users. Research conducted with Accenture developers found that 67% use Copilot at least five days a week, and 81.4% of developers install the IDE extension the same day they receive a license.
For marketers, this matters because it signals a fundamental change in where developers spend their working hours. They're spending more time inside AI-assisted environments, and less time in the places where traditional advertising has historically reached them.
The Places Developers Used to Live Are Losing Traffic
Perhaps the most vivid illustration of this shift is what's happening to Stack Overflow. For 16 years, Stack Overflow was the single most important destination for developers looking for answers. By late 2025, monthly question volume had collapsed to under 50,000, returning to levels not seen since the platform's launch in 2008. Between April 2024 and April 2025, total posts fell by 64%.
The decline isn't subtle, and it isn't temporary. Stack Overflow saw over 200,000 questions per month at its peak between 2014 and 2020. The site is now exploring a full rebrand, acknowledging that AI has fundamentally altered how developers seek and find answers.
The behavioral shift is straightforward. A developer who used to open a browser, search Google, and land on Stack Overflow now types a question directly into ChatGPT, Claude, or GitHub Copilot and receives an answer in seconds, without ever leaving their IDE. According to Stack Overflow's own survey data, 35% of developers now visit the platform specifically because of issues with AI-generated responses, positioning it as a secondary verification tool rather than a primary resource.
This pattern extends beyond Stack Overflow. Google's AI Overviews, zero-click search behavior, and the rise of AI-native research tools have all contributed to a shrinking web browsing footprint for developers during their working day. The traditional "search, browse, click" journey that powered both organic and paid advertising is being compressed or bypassed entirely.
More Developers Than Ever, But Harder to Reach Through Traditional Channels
Here's the paradox marketers are facing. The developer population is growing faster than at any point in history. GitHub reported that new developers joined the platform at a rate of more than one per second throughout 2025, pushing its total user base past 180 million. Developers pushed nearly 1 billion commits and created more than 230 new repositories every minute. Contributions to generative AI projects surged 59% year over year.
JetBrains' global population estimate puts the worldwide developer count at over 19.6 million professional developers in 2024, and that number is climbing as AI tools lower the barrier to entry. GitHub's Octoverse report highlighted explosive growth from India, Brazil, Nigeria, and other emerging markets, powered in part by GitHub Education programs and the launch of Copilot Free in late 2024.
So the audience is bigger, more active, and more global than ever. But the traditional advertising touchpoints that once intercepted this audience, search results pages, Q&A forums, social media feeds during idle time, are all seeing reduced engagement. Developers are spending more of their day inside tools, not browsers.
Trust Is Declining, But Usage Keeps Climbing
The data paints an interesting picture: developers aren't blindly trusting AI output, and they shouldn't be. The 2025 Stack Overflow survey found that only 33% of developers trust the accuracy of AI-generated code, and 66% say their top frustration is dealing with "AI solutions that are almost right, but not quite." But that skepticism is actually a sign of maturity, not rejection. Developers are treating AI tools the way they treat any powerful new technology: use it aggressively, but verify the results. The productivity gains are real. GitHub's research with Accenture found that developers using Copilot completed tasks 55% faster, and pull request turnaround dropped from 9.6 days to 2.4 days. Developers are building faster than ever. They're just doing it with a healthy review loop built in.
This creates a nuanced picture for marketers. Developers are using AI tools constantly but approaching their output with significant skepticism. That skepticism extends to information sources in general. Developers have always been a notoriously hard-to-reach audience because they value substance over polish and peer credibility over brand messaging. AI hasn't changed that. If anything, it's amplified it.
This is why the context in which a developer encounters your brand matters more than ever. An ad that shows up in an AI-generated summary or a noisy social feed doesn't carry the same weight as a placement inside a trusted editorial environment where the developer has intentionally chosen to spend their attention.
Where Developer Attention Is Actually Going
If developers are spending less time searching, browsing, and scrolling, where is their attention going? The data points to a few clear destinations.
- Inside their development environment. With 51% of professional developers using AI tools daily and tools like Copilot generating nearly half of all code for active users, the IDE has become the center of gravity. Developers are spending more time writing, reviewing, and iterating on code with AI assistance, and less time context-switching to external resources.
- Curated, high-trust content channels. Despite the decline of general-purpose Q&A platforms, developers continue to invest time in curated learning and information sources. The 2025 Stack Overflow survey found that 69% of developers spent time in the past year learning new coding techniques or programming languages, with 44% using AI-enabled tools to assist that learning. Technical documentation remains the top resource for developers learning to code, cited by 84% of respondents. The appetite for quality educational content hasn't diminished. The distribution channels have just narrowed.
- Newsletters and niche communities. The broader newsletter economy nearly doubled in 2024, growing from approximately 27,000 newsletters to nearly 53,000. The trend toward daily and weekly newsletter sends has accelerated, with weekly newsletters nearly doubling in frequency year over year. For developers, newsletters like TLDR, Bytes, The Rundown AI, and similar curated digests represent a deliberate, high-attention reading moment in their day, one where they've opted in and are actively engaged.
- GitHub and open-source ecosystems. With 180+ million developers on the platform and nearly 1 billion commits in 2025, GitHub remains the largest single gathering point for the developer community. The 2025 Octoverse report noted that nearly 80% of new developers use Copilot within their first week on the platform, suggesting that for many developers entering the field, AI-assisted development on GitHub is the starting point for their careers.
What This Means for Your Ad Strategy
The data tells a consistent story. Developer attention hasn't disappeared. It's concentrated in fewer, higher-quality environments, while the broad, interruptible surface area that traditional advertising depended on has contracted.
Here's how to respond.
- Stop chasing developers in places they've left. If your strategy still leans heavily on paid search for developer keywords or paid social targeting on LinkedIn and X, the data suggests you're paying more to reach fewer of the right people. Zero-click search, AI Overviews, and the collapse of Q&A platform engagement all point to diminishing returns on these channels for technical audiences.
- Invest in the environments developers actually trust. Contextual advertising in developer-focused editorial environments, like the Carbon and Mozilla Developer Networks, reaches developers while they're actively reading and learning. These aren't interruptive placements competing with infinite scroll. They're relevant messages embedded in content developers have chosen to engage with.
- Make newsletters a core part of your media mix. Newsletter sponsorships offer something remarkably difficult to replicate in other channels: consistent, repeated exposure to a loyal, self-selected audience in a high-attention format. For developers who have pulled back from social browsing and search-driven discovery, newsletters are often the primary way they stay current on tools, trends, and new products. AI-focused newsletters in particular are experiencing rapid growth and engagement.
- Think about brand familiarity as a long-term asset. In a world where AI tools increasingly summarize, recommend, and surface options on behalf of developers, the brands that are already trusted and recognized will have a structural advantage. Contextual presence in quality editorial environments builds exactly this kind of familiarity over time.
The Bottom Line
The shift in developer behavior is real, it's measurable, and it's accelerating. AI tool adoption among developers has gone from a trend to a default in under three years. The downstream effects on attention, information-seeking behavior, and channel effectiveness are already showing up in the data.
Marketers who adapt their strategy to reflect where developers actually are, not where they used to be, will be the ones who win this audience in 2026 and beyond.-----Ready to explore how contextual advertising and newsletter sponsorships can help you reach developers where they're actually paying attention? Our team specializes in connecting technical brands with qualified audiences in trusted editorial environments.
Schedule time to talk to an expert and let's build a strategy that works.
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