Tailwind CSS Lets Go Of 75% Of Engineering Team After 40% Traffic Drop To Docs From Google

"Adam Wathan the creator of Tailwind CSS posted that he had to let go of 75% of his engineering team because of AI. He said traffic to the Tailwind help documentation is down 40% and that is where most people learn about his solution and then buy commercial products. He added his revenue is down 80%. He posted this in the Github forums where he wrote the sad story about the decline."

""the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business." "Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever," he added. He then goes on to explain that "The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework.""

Tailwind CSS saw a sharp decline in documentation-driven traffic, falling about 40% from early 2023. Documentation historically drives discovery of commercial products and customer conversions. Revenue dropped approximately 80%, forcing the company to lay off roughly 75% of its engineering staff. Reduced engineering capacity prevents implementation of LLM-optimized documentation features like LLMS.txt. Tailwind usage and popularity remain high, but the loss of documentation traffic and customers made the framework financially unsustainable. The situation demonstrates broader AI search impacts on software platforms that rely on documentation to acquire customers.

Read at Search Engine Roundtable