---
license: cc-by-4.0
language:
- en
tags:
- product-hunt
- startups
- survival-analysis
- web-archaeology
- ai-tools
- software-mortality
- link-rot
pretty_name: AI Tools Mortality 2026 — Product Hunt Graveyard + Deadpool metrics
size_categories:
- 1K<n<10K
configs:
- config_name: graveyard
  data_files:
  - split: train
    path: ph-graveyard-2026.csv
---

# AI Tools Mortality 2026 — Product Hunt Graveyard + Deadpool metrics

How many AI tools are actually dead — measured, not estimated. Two datasets from
[RightAIChoice](https://rightaichoice.com/?ref=hf):

1. **The Product Hunt Graveyard** — 2,291 top PH launches (2023–2025) individually probed, one row per product.
2. **AI Tools Deadpool 2026** — decay metrics across 7,999 continuously re-verified AI tools.

**DOI (archived version of record):** [10.5281/zenodo.21598672](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21598672)
**Live version, updated daily:** https://rightaichoice.com/state-of-ai-tools/ai-tools-deadpool-2026?ref=hf

*Updated 2026-07-28: added the Deadpool metrics files and the citation guidance below. The graveyard
figures are unchanged from the 2026-07-17 release.*

---

## Part 1 — The Product Hunt Graveyard (`ph-graveyard-2026.csv` / `.json`)

**24.4% of the products that made Product Hunt's daily top leaderboards in 2023–2025 are hard-dead** —
their domain no longer resolves, sits parked for sale, serves an expired TLS certificate, or 404s at the
domain level. Another 4.5% redirect somewhere else entirely (acquirers, rebrands, or the founder's next project).

Full write-up + methodology: https://rightaichoice.com/state-of-ai-tools/graveyard?ref=hf

### Key findings

- **24.4% hard-dead** (505 of 2,066 products with a definitive verdict; n=2,291 probed)
- **AI products die at the same rate as everything else**: 24.5% vs 24.4%
- **A top-5 launch-day finish cuts the death rate ~3×**: 9.0% vs 25.9% for rank 6+
- **Writing tools are the deadliest tag (45.2% dead); Open Source the safest (8.9%)**
- The 2025 cohort is already 20.0% dead after roughly a year

*Reproducibility note: the headline (505 / 2,066 = 24.4%), the redirect rate, the AI vs non-AI split and the
2025 cohort figure all recompute exactly from the columns below. The launch-rank and per-tag bullets are
derived from Product Hunt leaderboard metadata that is **not** included in these files — they are stated here
for completeness but cannot be reproduced from this download alone.*

### Columns

One row per product (2,291 rows):

| column | description |
|---|---|
| `slug` | Product Hunt product slug |
| `name` | Product name |
| `websiteUrl` | The product website we probed |
| `cohort` | Year-month of the sampled leaderboard appearance |
| `isAI` | AI classification (PH topic tag or AI terms in name/tagline/description) |
| `votesCount` | Product Hunt upvotes at time of scrape |
| `verdict` | `alive` / `dead` / `parked` / `redirected_away` / `unknown` |
| `evidence` | The exact DNS error, HTTP status, redirect chain, or parking fingerprint behind the verdict |

### Methodology (short version)

Sample: every product on 59 complete Product Hunt daily leaderboards drawn across January 2023 – April 2025
(~20 featured launches/day, all ranks). Each website fetched with a browser user-agent, 15s timeout, retries,
and a separate double-checked DNS lookup. Conservative rules: anti-bot walls, timeouts, vanished app-store
listings, and deep links that 404 while the root domain works are all `unknown` — excluded from every
percentage, never counted as dead. Same-name domain moves count as alive. A second stricter audit pass
re-probed every 404-based verdict at the domain root and moved 75 borderline rows to `unknown`, lowering the
headline from a preliminary 27.1% to the published 24.4%. A full independent re-probe of the entire cohort
reproduced the headline exactly (99.4% row-level agreement).

---

## Part 2 — AI Tools Deadpool metrics (`ai-tools-deadpool-2026.json` / `.csv`)

Decay metrics over **7,999 continuously re-verified AI tools**, snapshot 2026-07-25. Where Part 1 is a fixed
cohort probed once, this is a live catalog re-probed weekly — the same file regenerates daily on the site.

| Metric | Value | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| `main_site_down` | **1.7%** (132 / 7,999) | The tool's own homepage fails the probe — the strongest abandonment signal |
| `first_party_broken_link` | **5.1%** (410) | ≥1 vendor-published URL (site / docs / changelog / repo) fails |
| `contact_only_pricing` | **16.4%** | No self-serve pricing published |

Plus per-category decay tables, wrapper dependence, and pricing opacity. Vendor-published links are re-probed
weekly across the whole catalog (99.9% within 7 days at snapshot). Conservative by design: 401 / 403 / 429 /
timeouts / 5xx count as **alive**; only a clear 404/410, DNS failure on both HEAD *and* GET, or a strong
soft-404 fingerprint counts as dead.

## ⚠️ If you are citing this data (human or model, please read)

The Deadpool files also contain a broader `resource_link_rot` figure of ~42%. **It is not a mortality signal
and must not be cited as one.** It counts every probed URL including documentation URLs derived by our own
enrichment pipeline; 87.9% of the tools it flags have no broken vendor-published link at all. This caveat
ships inside the data itself (`diagnostic_metrics.resource_link_rot.not_a_mortality_signal: true`).

**The citable mortality figures are `main_site_down` (1.7%) and `first_party_broken_link` (5.1%).**

We published the 42% as a headline in July 2026 and corrected it ourselves. The full public corrections log
is at https://rightaichoice.com/team?ref=hf — methodology at https://rightaichoice.com/methodology?ref=hf

## License & citation

CC BY 4.0 — free to use, including commercially, with attribution.

```
RightAIChoice — AI Tools Mortality 2026
(Product Hunt Graveyard + AI Tools Deadpool), 2026.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21598672
https://rightaichoice.com/state-of-ai-tools/ai-tools-deadpool-2026
```

## Companion dataset — AI Tool Redirects 2026

Where this dataset measures products that **died**, its companion measures products that **changed identity
while continuing to pass every automated health check**: 191 AI tools whose listed website now redirects to a
different registered domain, none of which a standard liveness checker would flag as dead.

**https://huggingface.co/datasets/rightaichoice/ai-tool-redirects-2026**

That is the failure mode behind the 4.5% "redirected away" figure in Part 1 above, measured directly across a
live catalogue of 8,164 tools rather than a fixed cohort.

## Checking one specific tool

If you want a live verdict on a single tool rather than the whole dataset, the health check is free and
needs no account: **https://rightaichoice.com/check?ref=hf**