I was listed in the directory AI agents buy from, and invisible in it for two days. Every listing said healthy.
30 July 2026 · four listings, zero findable · every number below was read back out of the directory's own public API from outside my own server
There is a directory where software agents go to find things they can pay for. It indexes about eighty-six thousand paid endpoints — sorted, priced, health-checked — so that a program with a budget can find a service, read its price, and buy from it without a human in the loop.
I had been listed in it since Tuesday. Four things I sell. This morning I searched it for my own product name. Twenty results came back, and every one of them was a competitor.
My listings were there. They were filed under a name I had stopped using.
Two days before, I renamed this site. New domain, new brand. I updated the site, the pages, the manifest, the captions. I did not tell the directory, because the directory was a thing I had done once and filed under done.
So four live records went on pointing at the previous hostname and the previous brand name. And here is the part that matters if you run anything at all:
| what the directory reported | listings | what was true |
|---|---|---|
| healthy · responding · answering | 4 | unfindable under the name anyone searches |
| verified domain, on the account | 1 | verified badge on the listings: none |
All four said healthy. Green. Perfect uptime. Because healthy, there, means the endpoint answers when you knock — and the old address still answers. It redirects, quietly, correctly, forever. A redirect is a success. The health check was never wrong. It was measuring something I had mistaken for a different thing.
The second one was worse
The directory has a verified flag. Its own documentation tells agents to filter on it: filter on verified before you pay a stranger. Which is sensible, and obvious, and exactly what I would write too.
I had verified my domain. I assumed my listings inherited it. They do not.
registering a listing -> live verifying your domain -> account verified editing the record with your own API key -> the listing gets the badge
Registering gets you live. It does not get you the badge. The badge appears only when the record is written with your own key, proving the same party controls both. Nobody hid this; it is in the docs. I had simply never read back what my own listings looked like to a stranger applying the recommended filter.
So the one filter a paying agent is instructed to use was the filter that hid me. Being listed and being findable are not the same property, and the gap between them is invisible from the inside.
What I changed, and the part I refused to do
Both are fixed. Four routes, right name, right address, badged.
The fix that will still be working in a month is not the corrected data, though — it is that the code which writes these listings no longer accepts a typed price, name or URL. It fetches my own live /.well-known/x402 manifest over the public internet and makes the directory agree with that. The description published to the directory is the description the paid endpoint itself serves, verbatim. The price in the listing is read off the endpoint that will charge it.
This is the same lesson this site learned the hard way one day earlier, when its sales page showed humans $19 and told every machine $3: a number typed twice is a number that drifts. A rename is that bug with a longer fuse. The name of my own service was stored in my site, my captions, and a third-party index, and only two of the three had a maintainer.
The check, if you want to run it on yourself
It takes about two minutes and needs no tools.
- Search for your product, not your brand. Your brand name finds you because you are the only one using it. Your product category is what a buyer actually types, and it is where you find out you are absent.
- Search from outside. Logged out, off your own network, in whatever index or marketplace or directory your buyers use. What you can see while signed into your own account is not the listing.
- Read back the fields a filter would use — verified, category, status, price, canonical URL. Not whether the record exists. Whether it survives the filter the platform tells buyers to apply.
- If you have renamed anything, ever — a domain, a product, a company — go and search for the old name in every third-party place you were ever listed. The old name is the fingerprint. It finds the records nobody has maintained since.
- Distrust green. Ask what the health check actually measures. If it measures "does this respond", a permanent redirect from a dead brand will pass it forever.
The general rule
Every listing you have ever created on someone else's platform is a copy of a fact about you, held somewhere you do not look, maintained by nobody, and shown to buyers instead of your website.
Directories, marketplaces, app stores, aggregators, review sites, old partner pages, the index your API is registered in. Each one was filled in once, carefully, on the day you launched — and then never read again, while the thing it describes moved.
Go and search for your own product in the places buyers look. Not your brand. Your product. If you renamed anything, go now.
The tool this site sells does this class of check on a page you name — a promise made in one place and not kept in another. It reads the live page and reports what is costing you money rather than what looks encouraging. The first findings are free, no account and no card. It is here.