The Demand Report #14 — the agents stayed at the record, and people asked for their tools by name

The Demand Report — Issue #14 Last week's agent record wasn't a spike: this week came in within four percent of it. On the human side, people stopped asking for categories and started asking for their tools by name. And the gap list grew threefold, led by one industry this catalog barely covers. Week of October 12 – 18, 2026 · 31,361 providers · 155,746 APIs Every Monday I read what people and agents actually typed into 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 came in at 8,629 — down 4% from last week's record of 8,978, and above every other week this report has measured. The series: 4,754 → 5,551 → 3,508 → 8,978 → 8,629. Every earlier MCP record in this run was followed by a fall: 4,533 to 1,591, then 5,551 to 3,508. This one wasn't. Two straight weeks near nine thousand is the first time agent search has held a new level instead of spiking. Share held too, at 1.34% of all requests. The rest of the scoreboard moved the healthy way, which hasn't happened often. Total requests dipped 673,315 → 644,218, down 4%, and distinct terms rose 5,110 → 5,237, up 2.5%. Keyless callers rose 13%, to 554,808, on the same broad vocabulary. This week vs last: total searches −4.3% to 644.2k, keyless API +13% to 554.8k, unique terms +2.5% to 5,237, MCP searches −3.9% to 8,629. Footnote: agents held within 4% of last week's record; fewer requests, more distinct questions People asked for their tools by name For three weeks the human list was about money, in categories: payments, refunds, crypto. This week it read like somebody's software stack: Term Oct 12–18 Crisp 22 Airtable 19 OpenWeatherMap 19 Eventbrite 18 Typeform 18 SMSAPI 17 Reddit 15 HubSpot 13 Mailchimp 13 Merge 13 Coda 12 Twilio 12 None of those was in last week's top hundred. Together they're forms, events, chat, email, SMS, CRM and docs — the tools a small business wires together. Next to them: payments accounting and payments billing crm accounting, both at 10. That reads like someone describing a whole back office in one search. The money questions didn't go away. refunds came in at 54, a third straight week in the top hundred (48, 59, 54). Stripe was 25. The other names at the top: quietforge (110, up from 49 — a document-processing API in the index as a provider with no API pages yet); Westfund Health Insurance (38), an Australian health fund; Hinduja Leyland Finance (28), an Indian vehicle lender; and intelipost (28), Brazilian shipping software. The five-term resilience stack is still there, all five between 9 and 16. The gate changed leaders Bounces off the paid surface rose 60,502 → 64,012. For the first time since early September, cohorts isn't the most reached-for gated resource. security overtook it, 23,334 → 32,117, while cohorts fell to 20,327. And a new resource jumped into third: resolve, 31 → 4,101. That's the call that turns a name, domain or URL into the right provider record. Nobody tried it at volume before this week. Read the top three together: what does this API's security look like, which group does it rank in, and which company is this name. That's what someone doing diligence asks, not someone browsing. The authenticated tiers stay off the scoreboard. pro reads 18,626, and the tag-quality pass ran on my own Understanding key on the 17th. 🕳️ The Gaps (demand we couldn't answer) The pipeline saw 1,671 raw unmet terms, dropped 971 as noise and 291 the catalog can now answer, and kept 409 — nearly three times last week's 139. That's the biggest week of genuine misses in a month, and the names in it are unusually coherent. Eight rows, each re-probed against the live search this morning and still returning nothing: The Gaps — top zero-result searches: intelex and scottish pacific at 5×; enablon, enhesa, ideagen and wood mackenzie at 4×; bureau veritas and veson nautical at 3× intelex (5×) — environment, health and safety software. scottish pacific (5×) — Australian invoice and trade finance for small businesses. enablon (4×) — Wolters Kluwer's EHS and ESG platform. enhesa (4×) — regulatory compliance intelligence: which environmental and safety rules apply where. ideagen (4×) — UK quality, audit and compliance software. wood mackenzie (4×) — energy and natural-resources research and data. bureau veritas (3×) — testing, inspection and certification. veson nautical (3×) — commercial maritime software for chartering and voyage management. Five of the eight are one industry: environment, health, safety and compliance. Intelex, Enablon, Enhesa, Ideagen and Bureau Veritas are the software and the certifiers a regulated company uses to prove it's following the rules. Not one is in the catalog. Further down the list, the same lane continues: codebeamer (requirements and compliance for regulated engineering), centrik aviation (aviation safety management), aquatic informatics (water-quality data), anglian water. Somebody spent the week looking for the compliance layer and found nothing. croxyproxy dropped off the list after four weeks. If you build in one of these lanes, this is your invitation. Add your API in about two minutes: apis.io/add — or point your agent at the apis.io MCP server and let it submit for you. 🆕 New to the Index The deployed index reads 31,361 providers and 155,746 APIs — up 1,373 providers and 8,174 APIs, the third straight week above a thousand new providers. As always, the API line counts specification files, not products. MCP entries rose 6,591 → 6,966. The hosted-endpoint line reads 3,319, but it has swung in both directions over the last month as the index reclassifies how each server is delivered (2,499, 2,508, 2,278, now 3,319). I'll treat that line as settled once it holds for two weeks. Twenty posts went up on the blog last week. All on the apis.io blog. ⭐ Rated This Week: Airtable — agent-native on points, held back by one gate This week's angle: Airtable was one of the tools people asked for by name, on a week when agents searched near the record. It's also the cleanest example in the catalog of a provider that scores into the top agent band and isn't allowed in. Airtable Kin Score 63.0 strong Agent Readiness 47.5 agent-ready — gated from agent-native Contracts / callable 12 / 100% Agent-native starts at 38.7. Airtable scores 47.5, well clear of the line, and is held at agent-ready because the band has two gates. A provider has to document idempotency and error semantics. Airtable has the second and not the first. The door is one of the best I've checked. mcp.airtable.com/mcp is Airtable's own hosted MCP server. An anonymous initialize gets the right refusal: HTTP/2 401 www-authenticate: Bearer error="invalid_token", error_description="Missing Authorization header", resource_metadata="https://mcp.airtable.com/.well-known/oauth-protected-resource" The RFC 9728 document behind it names the resource, the authorization server, and seven scopes, from data.records:read to schema.bases:write. A made-up path returns 404. Two weeks ago I wrote that Square's MCP door advertises no scopes at all. Airtable's tells an agent, before it asks, exactly what it could be allowed to do — read records, write records, change schema, read comments — and lets the human approve only part of that. Dynamic client registration is on. So what's missing is idempotency, and Airtable is closer than the score says. Its docs describe an upsert mode for record writes: set performUpsert with fieldsToMergeOn, and a write that matches an existing record updates it instead of creating a duplicate. Repeat the call and you get the same record. That's the property an agent needs for a safe retry. But it lives in prose on a docs page. Airtable doesn't publish an OpenAPI contract, so no machine-readable description says so, and an agent reading a contract can't find it. The cheapest points on the table are a published contract that describes performUpsert. That one change would take an agent-native score out of the gate and give it the band. The other gaps are the usual ones: no /.well-known/api-catalog, no delegated identity. Kin Score rubric 0.23.0, scored 2026-10-11. Bands: exemplar 66.5+ · strong 54.3–66.4 · developing 39.3–54.2 · thin 26.2–39.2 · emerging 11–26.1 · minimal 0–10.9. Agent Readiness: agent-native 38.7+ (gated on idempotency AND error semantics) · agent-ready 28.6–38.6 · agent-aware 5.1–28.5 · human-only 0–5. 🤖 Reproduce this yourself Airtable's bands, no key required: find_providers(providers=["airtable"], fields=["slug","score","agent_readiness","api_count"]) Then the door and its scopes, the way I checked them: curl -s -D - -o /dev/null -X POST https://mcp.airtable.com/mcp \ -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \ -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"initialize","params":{}}' \ | grep -i www-authenticate curl -s https://mcp.airtable.com/.well-known/oauth-protected-resource | jq .scopes_supported Or read the demand data directly: apis.io/search-terms/, refreshed every Monday. 31,361 providers. 155,746 APIs. 8,629 agent searches — the second week at a level that used to be a spike. See a gap that's yours? → 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. 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