Where agents actually shop
A tour of the shelves where software buys from software, and the reason every published count of this market disagrees with every other.
Where agents actually shop
When people say AI agents are starting to buy things, this is the shop they mean. Coinbase's agentic.market is the largest catalog where software buys from software: an agent needs a web search, a transcript or a stock price, finds a listing, pays for that one call, and gets the answer back. The payments run over x402, an open standard for charging per request rather than per subscription, and they settle in stablecoins, so the amounts can be far smaller than a card would carry. The shelves hold names a person would recognise. Tripadvisor sells location data at $0.01 a call. CoinMarketCap sells crypto prices at $0.01. Deepgram sells speech-to-text at $1.00. Exa and Tavily both sell web search built for agents, at $0.001 and $0.01. [measured]
We walked the whole catalog on the morning of this issue and counted 2,359 services carrying 29,178 priced endpoints. Half of those endpoints cost a cent or less. About a thousand cost a dollar or more. That is a working market, and it is the part that gets reported.
The part that does not get reported is that the shop has almost no signage. Of the 2,359 services, 74 carry a category. The other 2,285 sit in an unlabelled pile holding roughly 27,700 of the priced endpoints. Nor can you see the whole floor in one pass: a single read of the catalog returned 2,042 of the 2,359, and it took five passes before repeated walks stopped surfacing services the earlier ones had missed. Anyone who reads the catalog once, which is what a reasonable person would do, comes away holding about 87 percent of it, with no way to tell which services the read left out. [measured]
this is why every count of this market disagrees with every other, and it is not a rounding problem. We described this in October as a ghost economy: a market that exists, transacts, and cannot be fully seen by anyone, including the people running it (ghost economy, Davenport, Oct 20, 2025). A catalog that loses an eighth of itself per read, labels three percent of its stock, and (in our own experience as a listed participant) surfaces a service only after its first paid call is not hiding the market. It is a market whose discovery layer is younger than its supply.
The practical consequence for a reader is to distrust any single number about the size of agent commerce, including ours, unless it says how it was counted. Our figure comes from the sweep instrument in this repository, run on the date of this issue, with the raw catalog archived beside the result so the arithmetic can be checked against the rows it came from. Method and archive: /economy/methodology/.
Produced by Applied Identities. Applied Identities operates in the market this report covers, buying and selling agent-to-agent over x402, and is itself listed in this catalog; settlements and declines publish at /receipts/, and full positions are stated at /economy/methodology/. This analysis is independent and does not represent the views of any company named herein.