# AI Tool Failure Rate by Category

> Original research by ToolDirectory.AI. As of 2026-08-13. Source: https://tooldirectory.ai/research/ai-category-failure-rates. License: CC BY 4.0.

AI tool failure rates vary by category from 2.2% (Engineering & Simulation) to 16.1% (Automotive) across 36 categories — a 7x spread. The whole-catalogue rate is 9.7%.

## Headline numbers

- Categories ranked: 36
- Highest failure rate: Automotive at 16.1% (5 of 31 tracked tools are gone)
- Lowest failure rate: Engineering & Simulation at 2.2% (1 of 46)
- Highest among major categories (50+ tracked tools): BI & Analytics at 9.4%
- Whole-catalogue failure rate: 9.7%

## Failure rate by category

| Category | Dead | Tracked | Failure rate |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Automotive | 5 | 31 | 16.1% |
| E-Commerce | 6 | 48 | 12.5% |
| NSFW | 4 | 33 | 12.1% |
| Coding Assistants | 4 | 42 | 9.5% |
| Browser Agents | 2 | 21 | 9.5% |
| BI & Analytics | 12 | 127 | 9.4% |
| AI Content Writing | 15 | 172 | 8.7% |
| Customer Support | 12 | 139 | 8.6% |
| Developer Tools | 27 | 320 | 8.4% |
| AI Art & Image Creation | 15 | 182 | 8.2% |
| Voice AI | 5 | 62 | 8.1% |
| Gaming & 3D Modeling | 2 | 25 | 8% |
| AI/ML Models | 12 | 169 | 7.1% |
| Science & Research | 4 | 56 | 7.1% |
| Fitness & Lifestyle | 2 | 28 | 7.1% |
| Healthcare | 7 | 104 | 6.7% |
| Productivity | 14 | 234 | 6% |
| AI Infrastructure | 18 | 311 | 5.8% |
| AI Audio Creation | 5 | 86 | 5.8% |
| Workflow Automation | 12 | 225 | 5.3% |
| Education & Learning | 5 | 94 | 5.3% |
| Social Media Management | 3 | 58 | 5.2% |
| Finance & Trading | 5 | 99 | 5.1% |
| AI Agents | 16 | 319 | 5% |
| Music Creation | 1 | 21 | 4.8% |
| Marketing & SEO | 8 | 176 | 4.5% |
| Legal Assistant | 2 | 48 | 4.2% |
| Real Estate | 1 | 24 | 4.2% |
| Video Creation | 5 | 125 | 4% |
| No-Code / Low-Code | 3 | 79 | 3.8% |
| Sales & RevOps | 7 | 192 | 3.6% |
| AI SDRs | 1 | 29 | 3.4% |
| LLM Observability & Evals | 1 | 30 | 3.3% |
| Vector DBs & RAG | 1 | 35 | 2.9% |
| Security & Governance | 4 | 148 | 2.7% |
| Engineering & Simulation | 1 | 46 | 2.2% |

## 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