I'm Gabe Tramble. I run Shoal Research, a research firm focused on the agentic economy: how AI agents find, buy, and use the data and tools the internet is starting to sell them.
The thesis behind this take-home is the one I've been researching and publishing on for the past year. The visible race in AI search is retrieval quality; the durable race is contracted data supply. I've censused the open agent-payments rail end to end, probed how agent marketplaces route and bill queries, and mapped which kinds of data owners can actually sign.
Everything on this site was built the way I'd run the desk: taxonomy before targets, rights before outreach, verification before ranking, and the outbound enriched on Exa itself.