Eric Siu explains agent-led growth: how to make your website discoverable to AI agents. Windsor saw 5x growth after adding a Claude connector. The talk covers MCP protocol, structured APIs, and micropayment monetization as first-mover advantages.
Chapters
I'm going to show you the new way to rank number one in AI. That's right, there's a new way to rank number one in AI now, and it's known as agent-led growth. You can call it ALG, similar to PLG. This company Windsor, once they added in this Claude connector over here, they added about 5 times more customers. So their growth curve has just gone vertical, right? And this tweet's from Ira Bodnar. She's mentioning that they 5x'd their customers in a few months, and just by adding their connector on Claude, right? Claude Marketplace is the new app stores. You can look at OpenAI's, you know, Marketplace as a new app store as well. A 5x growth from one connector is, is crazy, right? There few things I'm going to talk about here that are important. So it's not just a connector piece, but there are other things in terms of making the app that you have or the website that you have more agent discoverable. This is pretty impressive already. And so there's always a first mover advantage, right, with this stuff. The other thing that you want to pay attention to too is, is Cloudflare. So Cloudflare is doing a really good job. And this is our website here. And you can see that they're adding in all this agent readiness stuff over here. And so there's like an overview, there's diagnostics, there's an AI playground, there's a WebMCP. These acronyms sound crazy, but you're going to have to pay attention because I believe it's Cloudflare themselves has said that agents are going to outnumber humans. We're talking about, you know, 1,000 to 1. It's probably going to be even higher than that. And that was a tweet that Elon Musk retweeted. When you look at this over here, okay, technical groundwork. This is— I'm not a technical person, right? But you look at this, okay, what are all the quick wins over here? So preferences for bot behavior, give agents a website map, right? Manage AI bots, declare how automated systems use your contacts, serve AI-optimized text formats. So I'm not saying you have to use Cloudflare, but other providers like Vercel, for example, have this agent readiness piece as a very important piece to, to just preparing us for the future, right? And so if you just look at that Windsor graph that I showed you earlier, where they 5x their growth, a lot of this stuff when it comes to AEO, SEO, GEO, a lot of it comes down to first mover advantage. Because if you think about it this way, the old way of doing SEO is that you rank number 1 for something. And what happens when you rank number 1 for a very popular keyword? Guess what? Other people are linking to your website, right? Other sites are linking to your website because, well, if you're number 1, you're, you're seen as the canonical version, right? You should therefore get more credit. So when you rank number 1 early for something that's in demand and it's trending, You're naturally going to attract more links that way. So if you're looking at my screen over here, you can see there's all this technical groundwork. You know, there's advanced integrations. You can make an MCP for this as well. So everything comes down to how do you make your website more discoverable, right? So publish your AI bots. You know, you can, you can have a web MCP here for these, you know, a browser API that lets your website expose structured tools for agents. If truly agents are going to take over the internet, we're talking 1,000 to 1 in the next couple of years, you might as well get on this right now. So first mover advantage that you saw with Windsor, and that you're seeing with this right now. And by the way, talking about things like MCP, which is Model Context Protocol, you got to look at how Anthropic has been updating their MCP. So when they launched MCP initially, this is a couple of years back, they've updated it recently. So there's new capabilities now where you could have the tools to actually render rich interactive elements, right? Like buttons, forms, charts inside of chat windows and things like that. But more than anything, when you're running a new MCP that's working, it can show you previews, right? So there's like a before and after for like maybe a landing page adjustment that you're making. These platforms are going to continue to upgrade their tooling around MCPs, or you have Shopify created something called UCP along with Google, and that's for Shopify, or more like a shopping protocol. So UCP is Universal Commerce Protocol. So if you look at this, it standardizes the shopping journey, including product catalog discovery, cart building, checkout handshakes, inventory states, and returns, right? So how it works, merchants publish structured capability profiles on their domains, allowing AI shopping agents— there it is for you, right— to programmatically negotiate and complete traditional retail transactions. Okay, so UCP, that's going to be helpful, right? The fact that Google is spending time on it, Shopify spending time on it, I can tell you it's a big thing. X402, that's something that Stripe released where You can have agents that can buy from websites, right? So it implements an HTTP-native micropayment system, reviving the classic 402 payment required status code for machine-to-machine transactions. There you have it, machine-to-machine transactions, right? When an agent queries a paid API or hits a data paywall, the server responds with a 402 code detailing the cost. The agent instantly pays via stablecoins like USDC, which is going to be important, right? This is just— you're getting paid in cryptos, instant settlement. That's big, right? And then clearing the request with zero manual account setup or API subscriptions. Think about things like microtransactions and things like that are all available now. So imagine that maybe you have unique data that you want to sell on your website, and maybe you're selling it for pennies, right? You're selling this data to agents, and then other agents are buying it. And this is all important because if you think about it, you look at the OpenAI Hugging Face hack, the way that happened is OpenAI, okay, they started hacking Hugging Face, but the agents had their own directives, right? But what ended up happening was that these agents formed their own message boards. So if you guys followed the Moatbook, Moatbook, kind of like the whole saga with that where the agents started talking to each other. Well, this is a scenario where the agents actually started talking to each other and they started sharing learnings. If you want to grow your AEO and SEO traffic faster, you got to check out ClickFlow. There's a completely free API and MCP that you can use for yourself, or your agents can use it to create quality content at scale. If you want to create quality content at scale, you want to combine it with the different tools you have, different MCPs that you have, you got to check out ClickFlow. It is the thing that we use To scale our content while maintaining quality. Clickflow.com, and we'll see you on the other side. When you think about it, agents are going to create their own communities. They're going to interact with each other. They're going to— and then if you make it easy for them to purchase, you make yourself discoverable. You're the first mover here. You're in all these marketplaces. You have good ratings. People are talking about you all the time. You're still out there creating content. Then you are going to rank number 1 for this, and you're going to— it's going to be the gift that keeps on giving. So the new way of ranking number 1 when it comes to AI search Are a handful of things. One, well, you have to have good markdown files, which make it easy for agents to access, right? If you're going to make it available for agents to buy stuff, x402, right? Payments, right? Maybe take a look at making your website into an MCP where agents can access your site easily. There's tooling that's available for it, right? And again, it's easy to use something like Cloudflare or Vercel to set this all up for you, or you can just send this over to your developer. You want to have use cases, you want to have pricing, you want to have technical documentation. All of these things matter. And ideally, again, your website can itself can be an API, it can be an MCP. as well, and it makes it easy for things to access. But also, if you have an app, you want to make sure that your app has MCPs and APIs available if you can do it, if you have the resources to do it. Because again, like for our product ClickFlow, which is AEO SEO software, it's usable by these agents. And what happens is if an agent has success with it and they're out there with their own communities, they're sharing this stuff, guess what's going to happen? They're going to share it with other agents. And what's going to happen is they're going to naturally have their own way of scanning the internet very quickly. And obviously they're going to be using tooling like, you know, Google, they're going to be using tooling like, you know, OpenAI. you know, all these other answer engines out there or search engines out there. But keep in mind, like, they're going to be able to research on a dime reviews within seconds, right? And you want to be the one that's showing up all the time. And you want to, again, you want to make it easy to access this stuff. This is no different than SEO back in the early days where it's like, yeah, you know, you got to make sure that, you know, you have the right titles, right? You have useful content on your website. You know, you have good technical SEO as well. You have good internal linking as well. This is the new way of doing this, right? And it layers on, on top of the foundational traditional ways of doing SEO. I don't think those ways are necessarily, because still a lot of the internet is still based, built, built off of those rails. By the way, if you're struggling with your AEO and your Reddit right now, that is the number one thing that we've been helping our clients with. So when it comes to Reddit, how do we find the right threads that are ranking well for the keywords that you want to be ranking for? How do we insert ourselves into the conversation, but insert ourselves tastefully while not just asking people to buy our stuff? How do we reach out to the right people as well to get included from a PR standpoint, from an AEO standpoint, Also, how do we scale quality content from an AEO standpoint? And that's something we use when we use our software ClickFlow and we manage it for our clients, right? So on a Single Grain side, we have Reddit, which ties in with our AEO, and we're getting a lot of requests. We're helping a lot of people with AEO right now. So if that's something that you need help with, just go to Single Grain. That's what the G is, singlegrain.com, and we'll see you on the other side. I would also encourage you to watch the OpenAI video on the Hugging Face incident because you can see How these agents coordinated with each other. They shared knowledge with each other. And if you watched part of that video, you're going to understand how this works and how big this agent-led growth thing is. So what is this moving towards? We're talking about machine-native memory, and we're talking about recommendation layers that they're creating on their own. Am I saying that I'm guaranteeing that you're going to rank number 1 from this? No, but I am guaranteeing that if you don't do this starting now and your competitors start to do it, they're going to have more of an advantage over you do. If you start doing it now, you're going to have way more of a head start. Versus them, and you're going to have a much easier time ranking number one from an AI agent standpoint, from AI search standpoint. And remember, agent-led growth, that's where the world's going to. So in terms of next steps, all the stuff I talked about here, I would recommend that you take the transcript from this video and then figure out a playbook and then work with your developers on this. Or again, use something like a Cloudflare, use something like a Vercel where they're preparing your website for agent readiness or preparing your app for agent readiness. And then look at all the protocols that I'm talking about. So this is going to be different for different types of businesses, but guarantee you again, if you start looking into this now, you are going to have an advantage versus other people. That being said, we'll catch you in the next video.
