We curated ~14,000 AI tools for 3 years. Here are the failure rates by category.

AI Tools Explorer is a manually curated directory of AI tools. We’ve been at it since 2023. Every tool is checked and vetted against editorial standards by a human. The ones that meet the bar get listed. The ones that later go offline get flagged during periodic re-checks rather than removed, preserving the failure record.

Over three years, that process covered over 14,000 tools across 20+ categories.

So we ran the numbers on failure rates by category for our listed tools and published the results.

The short version:

The AI shakeout is real, but it’s very uneven. Some categories lost 25%+ of their tools. Others are still growing. The pattern correlates strongly with where hype-driven building happened versus where real user retention exists.

What’s in the full analysis:

Category-by-category failure rates (2023 to mid-2026)
Three interactive Chart.js visualizations
Methodology and data sourcing
The pattern we’re calling “The AI Shakeout”

Relevant for devs building in the AI tools space, especially if you’re choosing which category to build in or evaluating the competitive landscape.

Full analysis: https://aitoolsexplorer.com/articles/ai-guides/ai-tool-failure-rate/

Would be curious to hear from anyone who’s seen this pattern firsthand, either as a builder or a user of tools that disappeared.