How much of Product Hunt is actually AI?
We scraped every product on Product Hunt’s featured monthly leaderboard from August 2025 through February 2026. For each one, we asked a simple question: is AI what makes this product useful, or is it just how the maker built it?
How we decided what counted
Product Hunt’s featured leaderboard is their curated spotlight — around 15 to 20 hand-picked products each month. For each one, we asked: is the AI doing something useful for the person using the product, or did the maker just use AI to help build it?
Those are two very different things. Using Cursor or Claude to write your code doesn’t make you an AI product — any more than using a power drill makes you a power drill company. What matters is what the product actually does for the person buying it.
✓ Not flagged
"Turn Slack messages into Jira tickets" — it’s a routing tool. A human is still making the decisions.
✕ Flagged as AI value proposition
"AI-powered code reviews the moment you open a PR" — the AI is the product. It’s doing the work.
Month by month
So what does that mean for makers?
Between 67% and 88% of Product Hunt’s hand-picked monthly highlights are AI products. And that’s their best stuff — the showcase. If your product doesn’t have “AI” somewhere in the pitch, you’re essentially fighting over 1 in 5 spots. The people who’d actually love what you built have a much harder time finding it.
We’re not anti-Product Hunt — it’s a great platform and it’s done what markets do: it followed the demand. AI is where the attention and money went, and Product Hunt reflects that. But that shift has quietly created a gap. There’s no obvious home anymore for the developer who spent six months building a genuinely useful app, the hardware maker with a clever gadget, the indie studio shipping a game, or the person building something with their hands and their craft. That’s the gap we’re building for — a place where great software, physical products, and everything in between can get the attention they deserve, without competing with a hundred AI wrappers for the same five spots.
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