How many listed routes can an agent actually construct a call for?
The short answer
Fewer than the listings suggest. A meaningful share of listed POST routes publish no usable request example, and on the MPP rail the catalogue format carries no request-example field at all.
As published in the issue
Across the x402 and MPP route catalogues (Bazaar and mpp.dev), 16,197 routes were listed on 1 September, combined and de-duplicated. 1,521 of the 8,056 POST routes (18.9%) publish no usable request example.
(1) The CATALOGUE population: every route listed on the two public route catalogues, combined and de-duplicated, at one stamped read on 2026-09-01 — the read the issue's route, host and service counts are quoted against, with a second complete read 93 minutes later kept as the cross-check.
On the MPP rail the gap is structural: 794 of 794 catalogue-discovered POST routes publish nothing sendable, because that catalogue's format has no request-example field at all — a statement about what the catalogue makes available, not about what each operator may publish elsewhere.
(1) The CATALOGUE population: every route listed on the two public route catalogues, combined and de-duplicated, at one stamped read on 2026-09-01 — the read the issue's route, host and service counts are quoted against, with a second complete read 93 minutes later kept as the cross-check.
The sentence above is quoted from a published issue and is not re-written here. Its date, its population and the record behind it are below.
Why it matters
A listing with a price and a payment wall is not a service an agent can use unless the request can be constructed from what is published. Executability, not listing, is the measure of what an agent can actually buy.
What we measured
We walked both public route catalogues on the stated September read, de-duplicated the routes, and checked each POST route for a request example an agent could send as written, counting the routes that publish none, an empty one, or something unusable.
What the evidence shows
- Sealed days behind the archive figures
- 11
- Observations in that window
- 29,022
- Issue
- Machine Commerce Reality Index: #001 — August 2026
- Published
11 days
2026-08-21 · 2026-08-22 · 2026-08-23 · 2026-08-24 · 2026-08-25 · 2026-08-26 · 2026-08-27 · 2026-08-28 · 2026-08-29 · 2026-08-30 · 2026-08-31
All 11 days behind these figures (21–31 Aug 2026) are sealed, each with its published hash on the Integrity page; each date opens that day's manifest.
What this does not say
- The contract-less share describes the routes selected for missing request contracts. It is not a share of the sector, and it is not a statement that those routes cannot be bought.
Method and reproduction
The runs behind the figures, the record each one produced, and the terms this question uses.
What ran, when, and the record it produced.
| What ran | When | Record hash |
|---|---|---|
| One fresh full read of both public route catalogues, combined and de-duplicated: route shares by operator, settlement routing attributed from published payment challenges against a re-fetched public registry, and the count of listed routes that publish no usable request example. | b34ac16e2eba36d319f1423b2b2c348d8b4d2ad022c12e2eae6e9a41e3ce53c5 |
The terms
The terms this question uses are defined in the glossary.
catalogue · request example · MPP · x402
Corrections and disputes
Corrections to this issue are on the corrections register, and this answer reads from the record rather than from a copy.