In February 2021, Chegg's stock traded at $113.51. Its market cap was $14.7 billion. The company was the undisputed king of online homework help, riding a pandemic wave of remote education demand. Students paid monthly subscriptions for access to a massive database of textbook solutions and expert-written answers.

Today, Chegg's stock is at $0.99. Its market cap has collapsed to roughly $156 million. That is a 99% decline. The company that defined edtech for a generation is now fighting to stay listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

What killed it was not a competitor. It was a category. ChatGPT and the wave of free AI chatbots that followed did to Chegg what streaming did to Blockbuster, except faster. Much faster.

The Speed of the Kill

For two decades, Chegg's business model was simple and extremely profitable: students needed homework answers, and Chegg had them. Textbook rentals. Step-by-step solutions. Expert Q&A. At its peak, millions of subscribers were paying $14.95 a month for access.

Then ChatGPT launched in November 2022, and students discovered they could get the same answers instantly and for free. Solve a calculus problem. Write a persuasive essay. Explain a chemistry concept. The chatbot did everything Chegg did, without the paywall.

Chegg acknowledged as much. "The new realities of artificial intelligence have led to plummeting revenue," the company said in October when it announced it was laying off 45% of its workforce. That was 388 employees. Its Q4 2025 revenue was $72.7 million, a 49% year-over-year decline.

Squeezed From Both Sides

AI chatbots were the direct hit. But Google's AI Overviews delivered the follow-up punch. Chegg recently sued Google, arguing that AI-generated summaries at the top of search results are "stealing" its traffic by showing students the answers directly on the search page. Between ChatGPT solving the homework and Google intercepting the search traffic, Chegg's entire funnel collapsed.

Last year, the stock nearly got delisted for trading below $1 for too long. It managed to claw back above that mark in May, but the reprieve was temporary. At $0.99 today, the company is once again on the edge.

The Warning Shot for Every Information Business

Chegg is not just a company failing. It is a case study in what happens when AI makes an entire business model irrelevant overnight. The product did not get worse. The customer did not change. A new technology simply made the product free.

Every company that monetises access to information that can be generated by an LLM should be looking at Chegg's stock chart and asking one question: how long until this is us?

Chegg will release its Q1 2026 earnings on May 6. The market is not expecting a resurrection.

Reporting from Times of India, TheStreet, and Financial Content. Stock data as of market close April 22, 2026.