Onet Shuts Down Zapytaj Q&A Site After Nearly 20 Years, Citing AI and Social Media

Ringier Axel Springer Polska is shutting down Zapytaj.onet.pl, the question-and-answer service that has run on the Onet portal since 2010. Starting September 21, 2026, the platform will switch to read-only mode, and by September 30 it will disappear from the web for good. The publisher attributes the decision directly to changing user habits, as internet users increasingly turn to search engines, social media, and AI tools for answers instead of asking other users.

End of a cult website

For nearly two decades, Zapytaj.onet.pl was one of the defining landmarks of the Polish internet, a place where you could ask about literally anything, from tech advice to existential questions, and count on an answer from another user rather than an algorithm. The site launched on August 1, 2006 as Zapytaj.com.pl, created by the company Dige, and in December 2010 it joined Onet's portfolio, back before the joint venture Ringier Axel Springer Polska even existed.

Over the years the service built up an enormous content base. Statistics published by the platform itself point to more than 22.6 million questions and polls, nearly 304 million answers, and more than 4.1 million registered users. That was material which for years ranked high in search results and drew traffic even from people who had never asked a question themselves.

The scale of the decline

Traffic data shows the scale of the erosion. In December 2014, Zapytaj.onet.pl logged 5.6 million users and 60.91 million monthly page views, with an average session length of more than 11 minutes. By August 2022 that had fallen to 2.77 million users and 18.26 million page views. In August 2026, just before the shutdown decision, the site was visited by only 273,300 people, generating 1.75 million page views.

That is a drop in users of more than 95 percent over less than 12 years, and more than tenfold over the past four years alone. Average time spent on the site also shrank, from more than 11 minutes in 2014 to under 2 minutes now, suggesting that visitors were increasingly people landing on a single thread from a search engine rather than users actively taking part in discussions.

The publisher's official explanation

In a statement sent to media, the publisher does not hide that competition from new ways of searching for information is to blame. The company points out that forums and open question-and-answer sites have been displaced by social media, short-form video, and AI tools, which today generate an answer tailored to a specific question in a fraction of a second, without the need to search through multi-threaded discussions.

The way internet users search for information and answers today has fundamentally changed: they use search engines, social media, and specialized communities - press statement from Ringier Axel Springer Polska

Search engines took some of the questions, short videos took another part, closed communities on messaging apps took some, and AI tools took the rest - Maciej Gajewski, spidersweb.pl

What happens to user data

Until the end of September, users can download a copy of their data through the profile panel, including their profile, activity history, questions asked, answers given, comments, and private messages. The administrator also announces the permanent deletion of personal data, although clearing backup copies may take several more months after the service closes.

The closure of Zapytaj.onet.pl fits into a broader trend of classic forums and Q&A sites disappearing, platforms that for decades were one of the pillars of what is known as user-generated content on the Polish internet. Smaller topical forums have met a similar fate for years, and even global platforms of this kind are seeing traffic declines as search engines and AI chatbots increasingly answer questions directly, without redirecting to the source page.

What it means for the Polish internet

For Onet, shutting down a service that for years has generated a fraction of its former traffic is mainly about tidying up its portfolio and shifting resources toward products better suited to current user habits. For the Polish internet, though, it marks the end of one of the few large, genuinely grassroots collections of content, where answers carried the traces of real people's language and experience rather than the polished style of machine-generated text.

The case illustrates well how deeply language models and search engines with built-in AI summaries have changed the economics of web traffic. Services that for years survived on users searching for answers to specific questions and landing on a page with a discussion are losing their reason to exist now that the same answer appears immediately in search results or in an AI assistant's chat window, with no need to click through to a link.