START: Caelean Barnes, CEO & Co-Founder, Gauge: "The Agent-Led Growth Platform"

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Amazon blocked AI agents from shopping on its site.

That might be the biggest opening Amazon’s competitors have ever had.

More and more buying now starts with an agent. Caelean Barnes says Cloudflare reported that agent traffic overtook human traffic earlier this year. These agents read your docs, compare you with competitors and decide what to use without ever looking at your homepage. Companies that let agents in get chosen. Companies that block them get skipped.

That’s the shift Gauge is built for. Gauge calls itself the Agent-Led Growth platform.

Gauge helps companies get recommended and implemented by AI agents. Its customers include Perplexity, Strava, Airtable, Product Hunt, DigitalOcean, LendingTree, Timex, Supabase, PostHog, Mintlify, Clerk and OpenRouter.

Agents don’t shop like people. They skip the homepage pitch and go straight to llms.txt, the docs and the reference pages. They get stuck at a credit card form, a sign-in or any step that needs a human.

Gauge runs coding agents like Claude Code and Codex through real tasks against a company’s product. It then shows where the agents pick a competitor or give up.

Gauge says the results are real: PostHog grew traffic from AI tools 41×, and Clerk tripled adoption of its CLI.

Some people have stopped opening their software at all. Caelean met someone who hadn’t logged into Salesforce in six months because her agents were running it for her.

His first step for founders is simple: point an agent at your website and see how far it gets.

Built for humans. Chosen by agents.

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‍🎙️Caelean Barnes, CEO & Founder, Gauge on Fondo START

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01:15 What Gauge does

02:05 From eShares intern to Carta

03:25 How Carta grew by working with lawyers

05:15 Why companies are building for agents first

07:00 Asking agents instead of opening dashboards

08:00 Agents running Salesforce

10:00 Agent traffic overtakes human traffic

12:40 How agents decide what to use

15:05 Why docs and open onboarding win

16:00 How to make your product agent-ready

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Check out withgauge.com‍