Not every corner of the AI market dies at the same rate. We rank every category in our catalogue by the share of its tools that have since shut down or been acquired and sunset — measured against the tools we actually tracked, not estimated from the outside.
14 of the 169 AI Content Writing tools we have catalogued are gone. Across the whole catalogue the rate is 8.3% — so this category dies at roughly 1.0× the baseline. We lead with categories of 50+ tracked tools: smaller categories can post higher rates off a handful of deaths, and the full table below shows them all.
Categories with fewer than 12 tracked tools are excluded: one death in a category of three is a 33% rate that means nothing. Rates are calculated against every tool we have ever catalogued in that category, including the ones still running.
Tools in that category that shut down, or were acquired and had the brand retired. Acquired tools still shipping under their own name are not counted as dead.
Every tool we have ever listed in that category, at any lifecycle. Both halves 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. The raw dataset is public at /feed/graveyard.json.
ToolDirectory.AI, "Which AI Tool Categories Fail Most" (as of August 5, 2026): 8.3% of the 169 AI Content Writing tools we track have shut down or been acquired and sunset — the highest failure rate of any major AI category (50+ tools tracked). https://tooldirectory.ai/research/ai-category-failure-rates
Free to quote with attribution under CC BY 4.0. Figures move as the dataset grows — please cite the date alongside the number.
Among major categories, AI Content Writing, at a measured 8.3% failure rate — 14 of the 169 AI Content Writing tools ToolDirectory.AI has catalogued have shut down or been acquired and sunset, as of August 5, 2026. "Major" means at least 50 tools tracked; smaller categories can post higher rates off very few deaths.
AI Content Writing (8.3%), Developer Tools (7.5%), Science & Research (7.4%), AI Art & Image Creation (7.2%), Voice AI (6.8%) — ranked by the share of catalogued tools that are now gone, across categories with at least 50 tracked tools. The full table on this page ranks every category down to a floor of 12.
Dead tools in a category divided by every tool we have ever catalogued in that category, 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.
No. Commonly cited AI startup failure figures (80–90%) are company-level estimates. This is measured at the product level inside a fixed catalogue: of 2,652 AI tools tracked, 220 (8.3%) are gone. The per-category rates on this page break that number down by what the tool actually does.
The pattern in our data is concentration risk: categories sitting closest to a foundation-model vendor's own roadmap lose tools fastest, either absorbed by acquisition or undercut by a native feature. Categories built on workflow and integration depth retain tools longer. We publish the rates rather than the theory — the underlying dataset is public at /feed/graveyard.json.
It is computed live from the Graveyard on every rebuild, so it is current as of August 5, 2026. Every entry is hand-reviewed, sourced and dated by an editor rather than auto-scraped.
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