Tailwind CSS Is Dead (And That Should Terrify Anyone Building on the Open Web)

Tailwind Labs recently announced it was laying off roughly 75% of its engineering team after suffering an almost 80% collapse in revenue. On the surface, it sounds like another familiar tech story: a developer tools company crushed by the death of SEO.

But that’s not the real story.

What makes Tailwind’s collapse genuinely unsettling is that its product is more popular than ever. Depending on how you measure it, Tailwind CSS is being used hundreds of millions—possibly billions—of times a year. npm downloads are through the roof. Developers love it. Its code is everywhere.

And yet: traffic down more than 50%. Revenue is down nearly 80%. The engineering team gutted. So how does a company with exploding usage end up functionally bankrupt? That paradox is the entire point.

To understand what happened, you have to understand what Tailwind actually built—and how the internet quietly changed underneath it.

Tailwind Labs did something genuinely great. They created beautifully designed, highly reusable CSS utilities. For non-developers, CSS is essentially the language that controls how the web looks: layout, spacing, typography, colors, responsiveness. It’s the design layer of the internet.

Tailwind made this layer elegant and composable. Developers could quickly build polished homepages, landing pages, dashboards—without reinventing the wheel every time. Even better, Tailwind published massive amounts of example code, documentation, and utilities openly on the web.

That openness did two things in the old world. First, it made Tailwind incredibly popular. Developers loved it because it solved real problems cleanly. Second, it made Tailwind an SEO monster. People Googled things like “nice CSS for landing page” or “modern homepage CSS”, landed on Tailwind docs or examples, copied some code, and often got upsold into paid UI kits, components, or advanced tooling.

What changed over the past year is not just “AI” in the abstract. It’s where developers go when they want code.

Instead of Googling for examples and browsing documentation, developers increasingly go straight to LLMs. They ask ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or some vibe-coding tool like Lovable to “build me a responsive landing page with X, Y, and Z.”

And here’s the quiet part no one likes to say out loud: The LLM doesn’t invent that CSS from scratch.

It pulls from the collective memory of the web—including the exact Tailwind examples that were intentionally made crawlable for SEO.

So now Tailwind’s code is being used constantly, invisibly, and at massive scale—without the developer ever visiting Tailwind’s website, reading its docs, or even knowing where the code came from.

Tailwind didn’t just lose traffic because SEO is dying. They lost traffic because the LLMs are giving the code directly to users without them ever having to know it came from Tailwind.

Google used to crawl your content and, at least in theory, send users back to you. It was a flawed but mostly fair trade: you gave Google your data, Google gave you distribution.

LLMs don’t do that. They ingest your content once, then replay it infinitely—without attribution, without links, without monetization, and without the user ever touching your site.

So Tailwind ended up with a brutal double hit. On one side, SEO traffic collapsed. The top of the funnel vanished. On the other side, their actual product—the CSS itself—was absorbed into LLM training and now lives inside other interfaces.

Usage skyrocketed. Revenue evaporated.

It’s like publishing a book, watching it get copied perfectly, distributed to millions of people, and being told, “Congratulations, you’re very influential,” while you earn nothing and your publishing business shuts down.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth: Tailwind knew exactly what it was doing.

They chose open licenses. They chose crawlability. They optimized for SEO because, for more than a decade, that was how you won on the web.

That strategy didn’t fail because Tailwind executed poorly. It failed because the rules of the game changed.

This is why Tailwind isn’t just a cautionary tale—it’s a preview.

Stack Overflow already learned this lesson the hard way. Tailwind is the next high-profile casualty. And they won’t be the last.

The real question builders need to ask themselves now isn’t “How do I rank better?” It’s “How do I participate in the LLM ecosystem without being eaten by it?”