Vibe Coding: April Traffic Steps Back; OAI's Codex Gaining Traction

Research evidence excerpt

Vibe Coding: April Traffic Steps Back; OAI's Codex Gaining Traction

Equity Research

19 May 2026

Vibe Coding

April Traffic Steps Back; OAI's

Codex Gaining Traction

Total traffic -2% m/m; web-based traffic -4% as Lovable, U.S. Internet

Base44, Replit saw MSD declines. Big picture, visits for the POSITIVE

three are up 45%, 56%, and 14% YTD, respectively. Business U.S. Internet

Trevor Young, CFA

models blur with a Cursor deal, as Wix releases its own LLM. +1 212 526 3098

OAI's Codex gaining ground vs. Claude Code. trevor.young@barclays.com

BCI, US

Ross Sandler

The following companies are privately held and are not under coverage by Barclays Research:

+1 415 263 4470

Anthropic, Cursor, Lovable, OpenAI, Vercel (v0), StackBlitz (Bolt.new), Emergent, and Replit. ross.sandler@barclays.com

Information about these companies is being provided for information purposes only and is not an BCI, US

investment recommendation by Barclays Research.

Alex Hughes

+1 212 526 3069The Key Takeaway: Aggregate traffic to our tracked vibe coding platforms in April decreased

alexander.hughes@barclays.com

-2% m/m. Within this, traffic to our tracked consumer website-based platforms decreased-4%

m/m, the first sequential decline since November 2025. Lovable, Base44, and Replit all saw

sequential declines (-5%, -7%, and -5%, respectively). Despite this slight down tick in traffic, we Michael DiSanto

+1 212 526 1054think it is important to see the forest for the trees, as April traffic for the three platforms is still

michael.disanto@barclays.com

up 45%, 56%, and 14%, respectively, versus December 2025 traffic levels. Emergent grew 15%

m/m, regaining some share. Bolt.new saw its second month of sequential traffic growth since

last summer, growing 3% in April m/m, while v0 saw worsening declines.