The Agent-led Growth Framework - by Hugo Santana

SubscribeSign in

The Agent-led Growth Framework<br>Something is changing in how things get found and bought.

Hugo Santana<br>Aug 13, 2026

Share

Something is changing in how things get found and bought. Increasingly, the first thing looking at your product is not a person. It is an agent searching, comparing, choosing, and eventually paying.<br>Automated traffic passed human traffic on the web for the first time, at 51% in 2024, and is already over 53% in 20261. Google referrals are down 19.9% since 2024, while referrals from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and other AI platforms are surging2. And it goes beyond discovery, in June 2026, Supabase said more than 60% of new databases on its platform were created by AI coding tools.<br>That changes how businesses should approach growth, as it moves from human centric to agent centric. This piece is my attempt at a framework for Agent-led Growth, what it is, where it applies, and how to use it to grow.<br>The name comes from Product-led Growth. PLG made the product itself responsible for acquisition, conversion and expansion. Agent-led Growth asks a different question.<br>What changes when agents start doing more of the discovering, evaluating, using and buying?

Agent-led Growth has the potential to be more impactful than PLG or any other growth model for one reason. Scope. PLG worked for software you could sign up for and use yourself. Agents reach much further. Products, services, brands, people.<br>How Agent-led Growth is Defined Today

Neal Behrend at Insight Partners splits Agent-led Growth into two sides3. Supply-side ALG is companies using agents to sell more efficiently. Demand-side ALG is agents working for buyers, researching, comparing and eventually recommending or purchasing.

Source. Agent-led growth: The next GTM motion is already here by Neal Behrend / Insight Partners.<br>I agree with that split, but I think the demand-side shift starts earlier than go-to-market. By the time you are rewriting documentation or optimizing for discovery, the important decisions have already been made. Whether the product has an API, whether pricing works without seats, whether what you publish can be read by machines.<br>Agent-led Growth starts at product design and engineering, changes how you market, and how you get paid.

The Agent-led Growth Framework

Agent-led Growth has two engines. One is how you build for agents. The other is how you use agents to grow.

The Agent-led Growth Framework.<br>Subscribe to Agent-led Growth and start receiving tools, tactics and insights to grow in the Age of AI

Subscribe

Agents as Audience

If agents are part of the audience, three things matter. Can they use what you offer, find it, and transact with it?<br>1. Product: Can an agent use it?

If an agent cannot reach, understand or operate what you offer, nothing downstream matters.<br>API-first: If your product only exists behind a UI, an agent has to navigate an interface built for humans. A clean API gives it a direct path.

Documentation is the interface: Agents read docs to understand what a product does and how to use it. Anything important that only exists in a sales call is missing.

Open source, where it fits: Open code creates more surface area for agents to learn from: repositories, examples, templates and implementations.

Efficiency: Agents spend tokens and time. Every extra decision, ambiguous default or setup step adds cost and another place to fail. Token-to-value is the machine version of time-to-value, measuring how quickly an agent can understand that you solve the problem and put you to work.

Reliability: A human may tolerate friction because switching takes effort. An agent can simply choose something else on the next run.

If this sounds like developer-tool advice, it is. Good APIs, good docs, clear defaults and low friction were already standard there. Now other categories have to follow the same logic.<br>If you are wondering how that translates to other categories, it isn’t too complicated. For a service business, the equivalent is public pricing, location, structured service descriptions, visible availability, and a clear way to take the first step (booking, making a reservation, etc.).<br>2. Marketing: Can an agent find it?

Once an agent can use what you offer, the next question is whether it can find you.<br>Structure beats style: Direct answers, clear facts and structured content are easier for models to retrieve and ground on. In practice, that means machine-readable pages, pages that the crawlers you want can access, and knowledge packaged in formats agents can use.

Place matters as much as structure: Models rely more heavily on some sources than others (Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube, Quora, etc). Those preferences change across vendors and over time, so distribution has to be measured rather than assumed.

AEO is downstream: Getting cited and recommended by AI assistants is key, but it is the result of the product and distribution decisions...