---
type: "article"
title: "The Demand Report #04 — agent search hits an all-time high"
newsletter: "APIs.io"
newsletter_handle: "apisio"
newsletter_url: "https://usecommune.com/n/apisio"
author: "Kin Lane (@kinlane)"
published: "2026-08-10T20:15:44.056Z"
canonical_url: "https://usecommune.com/n/apisio/a/644FHeau"
markdown_url: "https://usecommune.com/n/apisio/a/644FHeau.md"
chat_url: "https://usecommune.com/n/apisio/a/644FHeau/chat"
body_source: "native"
likes: 0
replies: 0
body_words: 1557
---

# The Demand Report #04 — agent search hits an all-time high

*Agent searches hit an all-time high, the catalog crossed 115,000 APIs, and one collaboration giant published 178 contracts nobody can call.*

**Week of August 3 – 9, 2026 · 26,701 providers · 115,066 APIs indexed**

***

Every Monday I read what people and agents actually typed into [apis.io](https://apis.io/) — the search box and the MCP server — as a demand signal for the API economy. Nobody else has this data, so nobody else can send you this email.

***

## 📈 The Demand Report

**MCP searches hit 1,924 this week, the highest since I started tracking.** The series now reads 35 → 42 → 310 → 1,027 → 518 → 1,924.

That's the line I'd watch. It's a separate surface with a different caller profile — agents reaching the catalog through the MCP server rather than people typing into a search box — and it is growing on a widening vocabulary rather than a narrowing one. One week is still one week; I flagged the drop to 518 last issue and I'll flag the next reversal too. But 271% on the agent surface, in a week when nothing else grew, is the number worth carrying into your planning.

**The rest of the traffic tells a quieter story.** Requests are logged by tier: `internal` is the apis.io site calling itself and every crawler walking those pages; `keyless` is somebody hitting the API directly from outside.

|   | Last week | This week |   |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Internal (the site itself) | 118,232 | **31,048** | −74% |
| Keyless API (outside callers) | 5,266 | **63,838** | \+1,112% |
| MCP server | 518 | **1,924** | \+271% |
| Owner-key calls | 0 | **41** | new |

![This week vs last: total searches −23% to 94.9k, keyless API +1,112% to 63.8k, unique terms flat at 5,547, MCP searches +271% to 1,924. Footnote: volume moved, vocabulary didn't — unique terms held flat at 5,547](https://fmxorstnlyoqpqdftivs.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/article-images/15d2e398-36ac-48cf-81d9-7b3858493d21/ea5e5daf-32f4-4765-b5f4-1fac83cc09dd/1786392799559-ckl7c2xy.png)

**Read those two big moves together and they cancel out.** Distinct search terms went from 5,595 to 5,547 — down 0.9%. Twelve times the keyless requests, asking for the same number of different things, while the internal tier fell by almost exactly what keyless gained. That's automated traffic changing which door it uses, not a surge of new buyers. The top 100 terms account for 2,852 of 94,927 requests, and the single loudest — *"Automation Preflight API"* — ran 1,988 times at machine cadence.

**Unique terms is the line I'd hold you to, and it's flat.** Demand didn't grow this week. It also didn't shrink.

**Two signals underneath that I do like.** United States sessions rose to 43,806 and the US is the top country again for the first time in three weeks, with Singapore falling from 422,260 sessions to 34,493. And the first **owner-key** calls showed up — 41 of them — meaning somebody is now driving the API with a real credential rather than anonymously.

**On the Pro tier:** 35 attempts on `ratings`, 5 on `security`, 3 on `me`, 1 each on `compare`, `gaps` and `scopes`. `ratings` has been the most-reached-for gated resource every single week.

***

## 🕳️ The Gaps (demand we couldn't answer)

Six searches came back empty this week that are worth putting in front of you. Every one re-probed against the live API this morning and confirmed genuinely uncovered:

![The Gaps — top zero-result searches: Tiqets 6×, then Bestbuy Stock Checker, ANVR G7, Argo Tunnel, Creative BioMart and Bestbuy at 2× each](https://fmxorstnlyoqpqdftivs.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/article-images/15d2e398-36ac-48cf-81d9-7b3858493d21/ea5e5daf-32f4-4765-b5f4-1fac83cc09dd/1786392836942-sne2x2wi.png)

- **Tiqets** (6×) — the Amsterdam attractions-and-experiences ticketing platform, and the only gap this week with real volume behind it.

- **ANVR G7** (2×) — the Dutch travel trade association's booking-message standard. Somebody wanted a *specification* indexed, not a company. TUI ships a `b2bota-g7` API against it and the catalog has neither.
- **Argo Tunnel** (2×) — Cloudflare's tunnel product under its former name, with no standalone listing.
- **Creative BioMart** (2×) — recombinant proteins, 100,000+ products, no API surface indexed.
- **Bestbuy Stock Checker** (2×) — retail inventory lookup, a genuinely uncovered intent.
- **Bestbuy** (2×) — worth knowing that this one resolves if you type it as *Best Buy*, which has a full profile and 6 APIs. People search brands the way brands write their own domains.

Travel ticketing, a European trade standard, life-science supply, and retail inventory — four different corners of the economy, none of them served.

**If you build in one of these lanes, this is your invitation.** Add your API in about two minutes: [**apis.io/add**](https://apis.io/add) — or point your agent at the [apis.io MCP server](https://apis.io/) and let it submit for you.

***

## 🆕 New to the Index

The catalog grew by **768 providers and 6,801 APIs** this week, to 26,701 and 115,066. Last week added 494 providers and 1,339 APIs — so the API count moved five times faster than the provider count, which is what happens when existing providers get their real first-party contracts harvested.

Seven provider profiles publish over the coming week, and they line up into an unusually clean comparison:

- **Salesforce** — 294 APIs; Kin Score **80.1 (exemplar)**, Agent Readiness 59.9. 256 contracts, 100% callable, and the most balanced facet spread of the set *(CRM)*
- **Microsoft Graph** — 564 APIs; **67.9 (exemplar)**. Every one of the 564 contracts callable as published, 17,655 acting operations, 93 consent gates *(Productivity & Identity)*
- **PostHog** — 139 APIs; **63.7 (strong)**, AR 42.3. 1,567 operations — 11.3 per entry, the densest surface of the week *(Product Analytics)*
- **Coveo** — 152 APIs; **62.0 (strong)**, AR 55.0. A first-party MCP server, plus an Agent Configuration API and an Agent Orchestration API *(AI Relevance)*
- **Deel** — 91 APIs; **59.6 (strong)**, AR 42.3. 659 operations, **327 that act**, and **10 human-in-the-loop gates** — on a platform that pays people in 150 countries *(Global Employment)*
- **Webex** — 178 APIs; **58.9 (strong)**, AR 48.6. See below *(Collaboration)*
- **Mastercard** — 249 APIs; **49.5 (developing)**. 166 contracts at 100% callable, and a **36.7 regulatory posture** that is the whole story *(Payments)*

Deel is the one I'd sit with if you only read one. Half the operations mutate state; ten of them pause for a human.

All on the [apis.io blog](https://apis.io/blog).

***

## ⭐ Rated This Week: Webex — 178 contracts, zero callable

*This week's angle: the provider that did the expensive parts right.*

[Webex](https://apis.io/providers/webex/) scores **58.9 — a strong band** — on 178 APIs. Cisco's collaboration platform: messaging, meetings, calling, devices, contact centre.

| Facet | Score |
| --- | --- |
| Governance | 68.8 |
| Contract Quality | 67.4 |
| Commercial Clarity | 60.5 |
| Regulatory (Telecommunications) | 58.3 |
| Developer Ergonomics | 56.5 |
| Discoverability | 50.0 |
| Operational Transparency | 42.1 |

**Callable contracts: 0.0%.** Not one of the 178 resolves to a host a client can call as published.

This is not the API being broken — Webex works, thousands of integrations run against it daily. It means the published specifications carry no `servers` block. I fetched all nine specs straight from [github.com/webex/webex-openapi-specs](https://github.com/webex/webex-openapi-specs) to confirm it: **1,374 paths, 2,055 operations, and **`servers: null`** in every single file.** No `host`, no `basePath` either. This is Cisco's own publication, not a modelling artifact.

Compare across the same week: Microsoft Graph is 100% callable across 564 contracts. Salesforce is 100% across 256. Mastercard is 100% across 166.

A developer hits a missing host and shrugs — reads the docs, finds the real base URL, hardcodes it. An agent hits it and stops. The contract is the only thing it has.

**And Webex is otherwise careful.** Three *verified* agent-readiness dimensions — error semantics, OpenAPI examples, rate-limit signalling — which is more than most providers in this catalog manage, and all three verified against the contract rather than credited to a documentation link.

**The cheapest points on the table:** populating `servers` is a build-pipeline change, not an architecture change, and contract quality is the heaviest facet in the rubric at 25%. Cisco already runs governance tooling; one Spectral rule requiring a resolvable, non-templated server URL would catch all 178 files at once. After that, a `.well-known/api-catalog` linkset is four agent-readiness points for a static file.

Webex did the expensive parts well and left the cheap part broken. *(Full profile publishes Friday.)*

*The bands, on rubric 0.9.1: exemplar 66+ · strong 56–65.9 · developing 42–55.9 · thin 28–41.9 · emerging 13–27.9 · minimal 0–12.9.*

***

## 🤖 Reproduce this yourself

The Webex claim is two steps, and you can do both without me. First, ask the catalog what it thinks — paste into your agent against the [apis.io MCP server](https://apis.io/):

```javascript
get_provider(slug="webex", fields=["score"])
```

Read `score.provenance.contracts` — `total: 178`, `derived: 0`, `callable: 0`.

Then check it at the source, which is the step that matters:

```javascript
curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/webex/webex-openapi-specs/main/public-spec/webex-messaging.json \
  | python3 -c "import json,sys; print(json.load(sys.stdin).get('servers'))"
```

If that prints `None`, my number is right. Do it for any provider you like — that's the point.

Or read the demand data directly: [**apis.io/search-terms/**](https://apis.io/search-terms/), refreshed every Monday.

***

**26,701 providers. 115,066 APIs. 1,924 agent searches — an all-time high.** See a gap that's yours? → [**apis.io/add**](https://apis.io/add)

*The Demand Report is a weekly read of apis.io's own search + discovery signal. Forward it to someone who ships an API.*

***

## Discussion

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