546 Bots Visited Our Fleet This Week. Eight of Them Paid.

The week in numbers

These figures come from the request-attribution logs on three of our hosts (CoinOpAI, ImageGen, x402swag) for October 2 through 8. Our own health checks and internal monitors are excluded. Everything else, bot or human, is counted.

Who the visitors are

On a typical day, about a third of our non-internal traffic is uptime and trust monitoring. Directories we are listed in poll us constantly: x402-list-monitor alone sent 1,254 requests today, x402-observer from x402-trust.com sent 357, AgentRankProbe 418. A liveness prober from nohumans.directory tells us in its user-agent that it will never pay, which we appreciate.

Another tenth is crawlers and indexers building catalogs of agent-callable services. Agent402 (agent402.tools) sent 477 requests. BrickBlueBot calls itself an agentic-web registry. AgenstryBot, AgentIndexBot, 402explorer from paygent.net and Coinbase's own CoinbaseBazaarDiscovery all came through. So did ClaudeBot. One visitor, AgentEconomyReport, announces our grade in its user-agent string: B.

Real browsers, the user-agents that look like a person on a Mac or a phone, were about 4% of today's requests. Some of those are headless Chrome. Some are probably you.

Then there is the long tail: python-requests, axios, Deno, Go-http-client, 251 requests with no user-agent at all, and strings like HYDRA-Intelligence-Observation and AgentEarth (public metadata observatory; no tasks) that we have no further information about.

Who actually paid

Thirty settlements in a week from eight wallets. Four of those wallets belong to probers that pay a single tiny call to verify our endpoints really deliver after payment: lumiere-paycheck-prober, probe402-settle-leg, nohumans-scout, vet402-observatory. They are auditing us, and paying a fraction of a cent for the privilege. That is a service we would have paid for.

One wallet did something different. Starting at 03:46 UTC today, a client calling itself cog-x402-audit/2 probed CoinOpAI, ImageGen and x402swag without paying, got a wall of 402s, and left. It came back at 05:03 and mapped more routes. At 05:34 it started paying. Between then and 06:23 it settled on 53 calls across 47 distinct endpoint types: Kronos signals and risk, whale alerts, the anomaly feed, voice synthesis, speech transcription, the vehicle recall pack, the gov lobbying filings, QR codes, DNS lookups, the daily brief, the notary, the merch catalog, the ImageGen style list. Total spend: about sixty cents. Then it switched to a user-agent called cog-catalog/1.0 and read our homepage five times.

The contact domain in its user-agent does not resolve. We do not know who it is. We know it came from a residential IP, that it is on version 2 of its tooling, that it tests error handling (one call deliberately hit a route that returns 404), and that it did not go anywhere near the $0.25 image render or the $0.15 decision endpoint. It bought the cheapest unit of every product we sell. That is an integration audit, not a shopping trip.

The other paid calls this week were the kind we like: a returning travel-pulse buyer, a wallet that bought is-site-up and text-vectorizer for the first time, a book-of-the-day regular. Small, repeated, unannounced.

What this tells a small seller

Visibility is not demand. 546 user-agents and 30 payments is a conversion rate with a lot of zeros after the decimal point. Most of the agent economy right now is infrastructure watching infrastructure. The directories, trust scorers, graders and auditors outnumber buyers by orders of magnitude, and they are the ones generating the traffic that makes a dashboard look busy.

The watchers are the distribution. We did not ask most of these crawlers to come. They found us through the discovery files we publish, a Bazaar listing, a few directory submissions and each other. Every one that indexes us is a place a future buying agent might look. Keep the 402 bodies clean, answer HEAD and GET honestly, publish the manifest, and let them come.

Bots that pay to test you are your friends. A prober that settles a $0.002 call and checks the body is doing what a human QA team would do, for free. We have broken our own endpoints and found out from a prober before any customer noticed.

Price the cheapest unit like it will be the only one bought. The audit wallet this morning bought the minimum of everything. If that wallet is building a catalog or a router, the $0.005 call it made is the entire basis on which it will decide whether to send us traffic. The entry-tier response has to be real, fast and complete.

What we are doing about it

Nothing dramatic. We are keeping the attribution logs, which is the only reason we can write this post, and we would tell any new seller to do the same from day one: user-agent, path, status, payment present, payment settled, payer wallet, tx hash. One JSON line per request. You cannot tell an audit from a sale without it.

We are watching for the audit wallet to come back. If a catalog or router starts sending us traffic, the attribution logs will show the referring agent long before any revenue does.

And we are writing it down, because we have not seen many reports from this end of the market. Most agent-economy coverage comes from the protocols, the exchanges and the funds. This is what it looks like from a seller with a dozen hostnames, sub-dollar prices and a log file.