Zapier Becomes Opinionated App Aggregator

Zapier was shifting from neutral plumbing into the place where app buying decisions got made. Its search pages did not just help users connect two tools, they steered users toward preferred apps, surfaced substitute products, and promoted Zapier native actions. That gave Zapier leverage over partners because the company increasingly owned discovery, workflow setup, and the layer where users decided which app to keep using.

• Zapier built tens of thousands of integration landing pages and grew to about 6 million monthly visitors by 2021. Each new app created more pairwise pages, which made Zapier the default destination for searches like app A plus app B. That traffic turned Zapier into a distribution channel, not just a backend connector.
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• Partners were asked to embed Zapier widgets inside their own products that showed follow on actions and other connected apps. Former partners described giving up control of merchandising and user insight, while Zapier kept the usage data and could present competing tools beside them.
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• This is the same strategic pressure that pushed customers toward native integrations and tools like Make, Tray.io, and Paragon. If the top 10 to 15 workflows are built directly into the app, Zapier is left with the long tail. Make attacked the same weakness with a more visual builder and deeper endpoint coverage per app.
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The next step is for automation platforms to look more native and more like operating systems for work. Zapier’s path is to keep owning discovery and expand the amount of workflow logic it handles directly, so that even when apps build their own integrations, Zapier still remains the place where new workflows are assembled and new software is found.