We have catalogued 2,461 AI tools. 189 of them have since shut down or been acquired — a 7.7% mortality rate. This is a live, hand-reviewed measure of how fast the AI tool landscape turns over, drawn from our editorial Graveyard.
Counts reflect the year each tool actually wound down (deceasedAt), which is often earlier than when we catalogued it. Recent years lag — failures surface months after the fact.
Absolute counts of retired tools per category. Larger categories naturally show more deaths.
This report and its underlying dataset are free to cite and reuse under CC BY 4.0 with attribution to ToolDirectory.AI.
ToolDirectory.AI, "The State of AI Tool Mortality," June 28, 2026. https://tooldirectory.ai/research/ai-tool-mortality
Every entry in the Graveyard is read, sourced, and dated by an editor before it lands — we do not auto-scrape, and we do not mark a tool dead just because its domain stops resolving. “Retired” means a hard shutdown or an acquisition; acquired tools that kept shipping under their own brand are tracked separately and are not counted as deaths in the cause and category breakdowns where noted.
The mortality rate is the Graveyard count divided by every tool we have ever tracked (active catalog plus Graveyard). It is a floor, not a ceiling: tools we never catalogued and tools that have died but we have not yet confirmed are not included. Numbers regenerate automatically as the registry grows.
ToolDirectory.AI has tracked 2,461 AI tools; 189 (7.7%) have since shut down or been acquired. Of those, 89 were hard shutdowns and 100 were acquisitions.
Across every tool we have catalogued, the mortality rate is 7.7% as of June 28, 2026. This counts both outright shutdowns and acquisitions where the original brand was retired.
The most common recorded cause is "Acquired and sunset" at 51.4% of retirements with a known cause.
46% of acquired AI tools kept shipping under their own brand after the deal; the rest were folded into the acquirer and sunset.
Every Graveyard entry is hand-reviewed, sourced, and dated by an editor — never auto-scraped. The full dataset is available as JSON at /feed/graveyard.json under CC BY 4.0.
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