If you're advertising to developers, your current playbook probably looks something like this: buy attention on the right channels, drive the click to a landing page, and let the page do the selling. That approach still works, and we're not here to tell you to scrap it.
But there's a new place where developers are making purchase decisions, and most advertisers haven't figured out how to show up there yet. We think it's worth adding to your strategy.
A growing number of developers are doing their work inside AI coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor, and Gemini CLI. Instead of opening a browser and searching for tools, they describe what they want to build, and the agent handles the rest, choosing APIs, databases, and services along the way.
This is a fundamentally different moment than the traditional "developer reads a blog post and clicks an ad." The decision happens inside the agent, often in seconds, without the developer actively comparing options.
If your product isn't already known to the agent, it simply won't come up. That's not a problem your landing page can solve, because no one's visiting it at that point in the workflow.
The way to be present in that moment is through what's called an "agent skill," a small package that teaches a coding agent how to use your product. MongoDB, for example, published a set of skills that lets any coding agent create collections, build indexes, and connect to MongoDB automatically, no copy-pasting from docs required.
Here's what makes this interesting from an advertising standpoint: once a developer installs your skill, it sits inside their agent and gets used every time a relevant task comes up. When a developer says something like "add a database" or "I need somewhere to store sessions," the agent reaches for whatever skill is already installed. It's not that the agent prefers you. It's that you're already there.
That's a very different outcome than a click. A click is one opportunity to convert someone who may or may not be ready. An installed skill is an ongoing presence in the developer's workflow.
This isn't a replacement for your existing advertising. It's an addition. And like anything new, it comes with some honest caveats:
There's no click to track. When an agent silently picks your product, it doesn't fire a pixel. Measurement is still evolving, and being thoughtful about how you track installs and usage matters more than ever.
Skills work best for open-ended decisions. If a developer already knows what tool they want, your skill won't change their mind. Where skills shine is capturing the "I just need something that works" moments.
Being early still matters. Right now, having a well-crafted official skill is a genuine edge. As more companies ship them, the advantage will shift toward whose skill is written better and performs more reliably inside the agent. The window to get ahead of that is open right now.
You don't need to rebuild your strategy from scratch. You can point your existing advertising toward this new goal.
Those sponsorships on developer sites and documentation pages? They're still valuable. But instead of driving to a landing page, you can drive to a skill install page. Same placement, same audience, different destination and a much longer payback window.
It's a small shift in how you frame the call to action, but it changes what you're buying. Instead of a click that might convert once, you're buying a standing presence in a developer's daily workflow.
It’s at least worth A/B testing next quarter.
We've been running ads on developer sites since 2008. Our network reaches developers across the Carbon, Native, and Mozilla Developer Networks, the same developers who are now working inside coding agents every day.
Here's how we work with advertisers on this: We start by understanding your product and who you're trying to reach. From there, we help you identify the right placements across our network and frame your campaign around the install, not just the click.
Once you're live, we track what matters: skill installs and, where possible, usage signals, the indicators that tell you whether you're building long-term presence, not just short-term traffic.
If you're already running developer advertising with us, this is a natural next step. If you've advertised with us in the past, it's a good reason to revisit what we can do together.
We're happy to walk through what this could look like for your product specifically, which placements make sense, how to frame the install as a goal, and how to measure it. There's no pressure to overhaul anything. This is about adding a smarter layer to what you're already doing.
Reach out to our team and let's talk about it.
Interested in working with our team? Reach out today!