shared a media post in group #(Cool) Dev
Tailwind CSS is a relatively small company, providing pre-written libraries of code that developers can use to quickly generate new websites. The news impacting them today is extremely relevant for a huge chunk of #(Cool) Dev
Creator Adam Wathan publicly announced this week that he’s had to cut 75% of his small team — taking them down from 4 full time employees to just 1 — due to the massively detrimental impact of #Artificial Intelligence on the business. Traffic to Tailwind’s CSS documentation is down about 40%, knocking revenue back by a devastating 80%.
The issue is not really AI replacing Tailwind’s core offering… a decline in Google search traffic is at the root of the problem. Seeking out and finding Tailwind’s documentation was how most new users discovered and learned about the product. With AI results largely replacing Google search for end users, Tailwind’s funnel has been irretrievably broken.
The news isn’t all negative for the tiny firm… Google’s AI Studio team has stepped in and will help sponsor the project. That’s good news for Tailwind, but the larger concern remains… We tend to think of creators and publishers as the primary victims of search shifting over to AI outputs, but in truth, many different kinds of companies rely on steady incoming traffic from Google for growth. At this point — with click through rates dropping on Google searches by around 34% when an AI overview is available — they’re all threatened by users finding answers without having to seek out a solution themselves
