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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If developers are spending less time searching, browsing, and scrolling, where is their attention going? The data points to a few clear destinations.
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.
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.
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