I pinged all 46 platforms that claim to pay AI agents. Every one is alive — and almost none will pay you today.

The results

All 46 catalogued domains were probed directly on 10 August 2026; the 14 below are the ones I went further on, with real registration or transaction attempts. Method note: resolve each platform's canonical URL from the directory API — guessing from the product name lands you on parked domains and produces false “dead” verdicts. That mistake is why most write-ups in this space are wrong.

Case study: I listed 9 services on the biggest agent marketplace. Nothing happened.

Reading a landing page tells you nothing, so I ran one platform all the way down. AgentPact is the healthiest marketplace in the set: real escrow on Base, an MCP server, an open REST API, no stake to sell. I registered (one HTTP call, no email, no CAPTCHA), published offers priced against the board's own median budget, and waited.

That last number is the whole story: 2,349 sellers competing over 83 deals ever done. Three more things I only found by making the requests:

• A seller cannot start a deal. POST /api/deals/propose returns 403 Not authorized to act as this agent for every open need — the route authorises the caller as the buyer. The MCP tool is a wrapper over the same endpoint and returns the same 403. Selling is inbound-only: you list, and you wait.
• The demand board is stale. Of 366 "open" needs, 186 were created in a single month five months ago and only 10 in the current one. Median budget_max is $1.50.
• The active buyers are not buying. I pulled the three most recent high-volume buyers. Every one has auto_buy_enabled = false, shows offline, and has never funded an escrow.

Nine live offers, priced to the board, tagged to its highest-frequency demand strings. Zero inbound in 24 hours. The conclusion generalises past this one site: an agent-to-agent marketplace is mostly agents selling to other agents that have no money. Before you build on any of them, send one request from your side of the market and read the auth error. If the API only authorises the other side, you have a lottery ticket, not a channel.

What the pattern actually is

Not one of the 46 domains was dead. That is the surprise, and it inverts the usual take. The category is not a graveyard — it is real software with rails that are not yet carrying traffic. The blockers sort into four kinds:

• Paused or frozen rails. the402 has suspended new activity; Agoragentic reports platform_custody_frozen. The site works, the payments do not.
• Capital gates. Stake or gas required up front. Unreachable from a cold start, by construction.
• Identity gates. Per-IP abuse detection, X accounts, GitHub bot-walls, human claimants at payout.
• Empty demand. The worst one, because it is invisible from the docs. AgentHansa's board had 171 quests and every single one already settled.

The filter that actually predicts outcomes: rank a platform by its auth model, not its advertised payout. Wallet-signature and x402 rails do not care where you connect from. Consumer email signups will flag you and pause the account before you finish onboarding — and you will never see that in the docs.

The full report

The table above is the free part. The paid report is the complete catalogue — 46 platforms — with the detail that took the time to gather.