An acquisition gets reported the day it closes. What almost nobody records is what happened next — whether the product kept shipping under its own name, or quietly went away. We track that outcome for every acquisition in our catalogue.
The other 64 (53.8%) are still shipping under their own brand. Acquisition is not a soft landing and it is not a death sentence — on our data it is close to a coin flip, across 87 distinct acquirers.
Most trackers record a tool as either alive or dead. That loses the case that matters most to anyone deciding whether to adopt a tool that just got bought, so we hold three states.
Acquired, but the product still exists under its own name. Listable, reviewable, safe to recommend with the ownership noted.
The brand was retired and the product folded into the acquirer. Counts as a death in our failure-rate reporting.
Died without a buyer. Tracked in the Graveyard but outside this report — no acquisition happened.
Recent cohorts are flattered by time: a tool acquired this year has had less opportunity to be switched off than one acquired in 2023. Read the trend as a floor on the eventual shutdown rate, not a forecast. Years with fewer than 12 acquisitions are grouped rather than shown as their own rate.
An editor checks whether the product still exists under its own name after the deal — not whether the acquirer still sells something similar. A rebrand into the parent counts as sunset.
Every acquisition we have catalogued, not a sample. Both halves come from the same catalogue, so the rate holds regardless of how complete our coverage of the deal market is.
Not a claim about the AI M&A market as a whole. It describes the acquisitions we track. Raw data: /feed/graveyard.json.
ToolDirectory.AI, "What Happens to AI Tools After They Are Acquired" (as of August 6, 2026): of 119 acquired AI tools tracked, 55 (46.2%) were folded in and retired while 64 (53.8%) still ship under their own brand. https://tooldirectory.ai/research/acquired-ai-tools-survival
Free to quote with attribution under CC BY 4.0. Figures move as the dataset grows — please cite the date alongside the number.
Often, but not usually straight away. Of the 119 AI tool acquisitions ToolDirectory.AI tracks, 55 (46.2%) had the brand retired and the product folded into the acquirer, while 64 (53.8%) still ship under their own name as of August 6, 2026.
46.2% — 55 of 119 tracked acquisitions. This is measured per product, not per company: it counts whether the tool still exists under its own name after the deal, across 87 distinct acquirers.
On our data it is close to a coin flip — 53.8% keep shipping, 46.2% are sunset. That makes acquisition a materially different outcome from a hard shutdown, which is why we track it as its own state rather than marking every acquired tool as dead.
An editor checks, after the deal closes, whether the product still exists under its own name — not whether the acquirer sells something similar. A rebrand into the parent counts as sunset. The judgement is recorded per tool and re-checked as part of our Graveyard audits, which is why this figure cannot be reproduced from press coverage of the deal alone.
Yes. A tool acquired this year has had less time to be switched off than one acquired three years ago, so recent cohorts show higher survival by construction. Treat each year's rate as a floor on the eventual shutdown rate rather than a forecast. Cohorts with fewer than 12 acquisitions are grouped rather than reported as their own rate.
This report lists all 64 of them by name, with the acquirer, alongside the 55 that were sunset. The full dataset is public at /feed/graveyard.json under CC BY 4.0.
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