Meet Claude, Your New Distribution Partner; GitHub, Your New Marketplace

Written by Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist, Zoho

A few weeks ago, I was going back-and-forth with Claude about whether to keep my Intel-based iMac or upgrade. After a few rounds, once it understood how I planned to use the machine going forward, Claude told me to bite the bullet and get an M-based Mac. I took its advice and bought one.

Around the same time, I was trying to build an app using Claude. Along the way, it suggested some third-party services I had never heard of, like Vercel and Neon. I asked it to explain why these fit my project. After hearing it out, I ended up buying those services despite not knowing the companies before that conversation.

These are just two of many recent purchase decisions I made by leaning on Claude, OpenAI, or Grok. I am no longer opening Google, typing a query, and digging through SEO-stuffed sponsored pages hoping to find something honest that fits my needs. Those days are gone.

Buyer behavior is changing. Seller behavior has to change with it.

Claude, along with OpenAI, Grok, and Gemini, is a new source of distribution. This is the new SEO. If these AI engines can't find your product, you lose visibility. Claude.md is the new robots.txt. It becomes essential to make our products, their capabilities, and the right context available to these AI engines, in the format they consume. We can even use these same engines to help us create that information after feeding them what they need to know.

There is a bigger trend here. 

Claude is also enabling anyone to build an app. Apps are going bespoke. The moment feels like when Excel first arrived. That simple spreadsheet grid empowered everyday people to build mini-apps without ever calling themselves programmers. When common people feel empowered, a lot of them jump in to create 'apps'.

The numbers tell the story. There are around 20 million programmers in the world, but close to 1 billion Excel users. Now, those Excel users have something even bigger in their hands. They can build full applications, not just spreadsheets.

As a result, open source is rising again. People are building things and opening them up, because building has become easy and sharing feels natural.

This is why GitHub is exploding. A simple look at the Google trend tells the story.

This is the second part of the story. When AI engines help someone build, they reach into GitHub for the pieces. SDKs, sample code, tool definitions, MCP servers, all live there. So if AI engines are the new distribution, GitHub is the shelf they pull from. That is what makes GitHub the new marketplace. Not npm, not some private app store, not even the AI provider's own directory. GitHub is where the source of truth lives, and the AI goes there to find it.

If we want to be visible in this new world, we need a strong shop in that marketplace. Our presence there has to include clear instructions for Claude and other AI engines on how to use our tools, so those tools become the entry point into the Zoho ecosystem.

This means, we need to build a strong presence on GitHub and invest in making ourselves visible to AI engines. Open source meaningful pieces of our stack on GitHub. Publish MCP servers for our products so AI engines can actually use them, not just read about them. Write Claude.md files that explain our tools the way these engines like to read. Make our APIs and docs friendly to LLM consumption, not just human reading.

The old playbook does not apply here. We are navigating a new market, and the signs are pointing in one direction. Claude and the other AI engines are becoming crucial distribution channels. GitHub is becoming the marketplace that feeds them. We need a strong presence in both, and we need to start now.