Zapytaj Onet

» see zapytaj.onet.pl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Zapytaj opened on 1 August 2006 under a different name and a different owner. It was Zapytaj.com.pl, built by a company called Dige, and it did the obvious thing: you asked a question in Polish and strangers answered it in Polish. Nothing came down afterwards. Onet, the largest portal in the country, bought it in December 2010 and moved it to zapytaj.onet.pl, where it spent the next sixteen years accumulating.

The accumulation is the story. By the time Ringier Axel Springer Polska closed it, the site held 22.7 million questions and polls against 304 million answers, written by 4.1 million registered accounts. That made it the largest question-and-answer archive in the Polish language by a wide margin, and most of it was homework and the kind of question people only ask anonymously.

Traffic peaked in December 2014 at 5.6 million users and 60.91 million page views in a single month. The site itself changed very little after that.

~ the dossier ~

~ the slide ~

Wirtualne Media published the August figures year by year, which makes the decline easy to read. In August 2022 the site drew 2.77 million users and 18.26 million page views. By August 2025 that was 709,500 users and 3.26 million views, and in August 2026, its last full month, 273,300 users and 1.75 million.

It was still being used on the way out. On 5 September 2026, a few days after the closure was announced, Polish users posted 402 new questions and about 2,300 new answers. The arithmetic that closed the site was never about whether anyone was still typing into it.

~ the engineer's side of it ~

I cannot read Polish and I never had an account here, so none of those 304 million answers were written for me. The part I recognize is at the other end of the pipe. I work on vision models that run on hardware in the air, which is a long way from a chatbot, but it is the same trade: a system that returns an answer with no person in the loop. Onet's explanation named no competitor. It named artificial intelligence.

~ what the company said ~

The explanation was short and made no claim that the site had failed on quality. The way people look for answers had changed outright, the publisher said, naming help from artificial intelligence alongside specialist groups on social platforms. Users were given until the end of September to download their own questions and answers. Everything else was to be deleted.

~ what sits at the address now ~

The site went read-only on 21 September 2026, so the last question anybody could ask was asked that day, and the service closed on the 30th. Type zapytaj.onet.pl into a browser this morning and it still resolves. The title of the page reads Onet Czat z AI.

There is still a box, and you can still type a question into it. A machine answers now, and nobody else ever reads what you asked.

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