# AI Tool Failure Rate by Category

> Original research by ToolDirectory.AI. As of 2026-08-07. Source: https://tooldirectory.ai/research/ai-category-failure-rates. License: CC BY 4.0.

AI tool failure rates vary by category from 2.1% (Security & Governance) to 16.1% (Automotive) across 33 categories — a 8x spread. The whole-catalogue rate is 8.7%.

## Headline numbers

- Categories ranked: 33
- Highest failure rate: Automotive at 16.1% (5 of 31 tracked tools are gone)
- Lowest failure rate: Security & Governance at 2.1% (3 of 144)
- Highest among major categories (50+ tracked tools): Customer Support at 8.8%
- Whole-catalogue failure rate: 8.7%

## Failure rate by category

| Category | Dead | Tracked | Failure rate |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Automotive | 5 | 31 | 16.1% |
| NSFW | 4 | 33 | 12.1% |
| E-Commerce | 5 | 47 | 10.6% |
| Customer Support | 12 | 137 | 8.8% |
| AI Content Writing | 14 | 169 | 8.3% |
| Gaming & 3D Modeling | 2 | 24 | 8.3% |
| BI & Analytics | 10 | 123 | 8.1% |
| Developer Tools | 25 | 318 | 7.9% |
| AI Art & Image Creation | 14 | 180 | 7.8% |
| Coding Assistants | 3 | 40 | 7.5% |
| Science & Research | 4 | 54 | 7.4% |
| Fitness & Lifestyle | 2 | 27 | 7.4% |
| Voice AI | 4 | 59 | 6.8% |
| AI/ML Models | 11 | 166 | 6.6% |
| AI Infrastructure | 18 | 301 | 6% |
| Workflow Automation | 12 | 221 | 5.4% |
| Productivity | 12 | 225 | 5.3% |
| Social Media Management | 3 | 57 | 5.3% |
| Healthcare | 5 | 100 | 5% |
| AI Audio Creation | 4 | 84 | 4.8% |
| Music Creation | 1 | 21 | 4.8% |
| Finance & Trading | 4 | 93 | 4.3% |
| Legal Assistant | 2 | 46 | 4.3% |
| Marketing & SEO | 7 | 167 | 4.2% |
| No-Code / Low-Code | 3 | 78 | 3.8% |
| AI SDRs | 1 | 26 | 3.8% |
| AI Agents | 10 | 288 | 3.5% |
| Education & Learning | 3 | 93 | 3.2% |
| Vector DBs & RAG | 1 | 34 | 2.9% |
| Sales & RevOps | 5 | 188 | 2.7% |
| Video Creation | 3 | 121 | 2.5% |
| Engineering & Simulation | 1 | 44 | 2.3% |
| Security & Governance | 3 | 144 | 2.1% |

## Methodology

A category's failure rate is its dead tools divided by every tool we have ever catalogued in it, at any lifecycle. A tool counts as dead if it shut down, or was acquired and had its brand retired; acquired tools still shipping under their own name are excluded from the numerator. Categories with fewer than 12 tracked tools are excluded entirely, because rates on tiny samples are noise. Both halves of the ratio come from the same catalogue, so the rate holds regardless of how complete our coverage is. Every retirement is hand-reviewed, sourced and dated by an editor — never auto-scraped. Full machine-readable dataset: https://tooldirectory.ai/feed/graveyard.json