40% of Signups This Week Came From AI Recommendations
TL;DR >> Checked onboarding responses. Exactly 40% of new users in the last seven days found steel.dev through AI tools. Not Google. Not ads. Users told us this during signup. <<
I checked our onboarding flow for the last seven days.
Exactly 40% of new signups came through AI recommendations—that’s not just traffic source, that’s what users told us during onboarding when asked how they found us. Someone asked ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude for a browser automation solution, and the AI pointed them to us.
No surprises here. It’s not some AI-has-arrived moment. It’s just data. A pattern in a real product, with real users, over a real week.
But here’s what makes it interesting: for dev tools, 40% from AI recommendations is a signal of changing surfaces. The people building AI agents are discovering infrastructure through AI assistants. The channel matches the customer.
We still position ourselves as browser infrastructure. But the majority of actual use cases? Giving browsers to agents. The web isn’t being replaced; it’s being operated. The product positioning catches up slowly, but the users are already there.
Here’s the part I’m thinking about more: if today’s users find us by asking AI, tomorrow’s users might not ask at all.
Their agents will decide.
You need a browser session for a workflow. Your agent researches options, evaluates tradeoffs, picks one, integrates it. You don’t know which product. You don’t care. The agent handles procurement the same way it handles config or deployments.
We’re not there yet. But if 40% of discovery is already AI-mediated, the next step isn’t that far. The question shifts from “how do I rank on Google” to “how do I become the default choice for agents making decisions I’ll never see.”
We didn’t optimize for any of this. It just happened. But I’m paying attention now.