AI Tools Deadpool 2026: how many AI tools are dead or dying?

A dead homepage is the clearest signal. 132 tools (1.7%) have their own homepage down — which almost always means the product itself is gone. Widening to every URL the vendor publishes (site, docs, changelog, code repository), 410 tools (5.1%) have at least one broken vendor link. That is the number we stand behind, and it is deliberately narrow.

The number we refuse to headline. Our enrichment pipeline derives extra documentation and tutorial URLs for each tool, and our probe checks those too. Counting every probed URL, 3,420 tools (42.8%) have something broken — but 3,010 of them (88%) are flagged only by a URL we derived ourselves, many of which never existed. Healthy, actively-shipping products sit in that number. We publish it as resource link rot, not as mortality, and we would rather explain the gap than quote the bigger figure.

Pricing you can’t see. 1,310 tools (16.4%) publish contact-sales-only pricing — a vendor choice, but it means you cannot evaluate cost without a call. A further 917 (11.5%) have no pricing tiers recorded in our catalog; that is a gap in our data, and we count it separately rather than blaming the vendor for it.

Wrapper dependence. 315 tools (3.9%) are thin wrappers over another company’s model. They’re not dead, but their survival is tied to a provider they don’t control — a distinct, nameable shutdown risk.

A deliberate exclusion: 92 tools have been removed from our catalog — but every one failed our AI-authenticity audit (they aren’t AI tools). The companies may be alive; we never count a catalog removal as a death.

Catalog metrics (live): computed daily from every published tool in our database. “≥1 broken vendor-published link” (the headline) = at least one of exactly four URLs the vendor publishes — website, documentation, changelog, code repository — failed our automated link-health probe. “Main website down” = the tool’s own homepage URL is itself among those dead links (exact-page match, after normalising scheme, www. and trailing slashes). “Contact-only pricing” = the vendor publishes no self-serve price. “Pricing not recorded” = we hold no pricing tiers for it — our gap, reported separately. “Wrapper” = flagged as a thin layer over another provider’s model.

A known limitation we publish rather than hide: our enrichment pipeline derives additional documentation and tutorial URLs per tool, and the probe checks them alongside the vendor’s own. A derived URL that never existed fails the probe exactly like a page that was taken down. That is why the broad “resource link rot” figure (42.8%) is not our headline: 88% of the tools it flags have no broken vendor-published link at all. Only the 5.1% vendor-link figure and the 1.7% homepage-down figure should be read as decay. We are separately correcting the derived-URL generation; until then, both numbers stay on the page with this caveat attached.

Conservative by design: we round to one decimal, exclude ambiguous cases, treat 401/403/429/timeouts/5xx as alive (never hide a bot-blocked but live link), and report the strong signal (main-site-down) separately from the broad one so nothing is overstated. Removed non-AI tools are never counted as deaths.

The Product Hunt study (frozen): a fixed sample of 2,291 launches probed once, dated July 18, 2026; full methodology on the graveyard page.

Accuracy: the live numbers are recomputed and cross-checked by an automated job every few days; any drift beyond tolerance alerts us before it can mislead anyone.