How AI Agents Actually Find and Pay for APIs in 2026
An AI agent needs Korean crypto market data. It doesn't open a browser, google "kimchi premium API," read blog posts, compare pricing pages, and sign up for an account. That's the human workflow. The agent workflow is completely different, and understanding it matters if you're building anything agents are supposed to find. This post walks through how agents actually discover services, evaluate them, and pay — based on what I've observed from the provider side of a live x402 API . The Discovery Layer: Three Catalogs Agents find services through structured catalogs, not web searches. Three catalogs matter right now: Agentic.market (CDP Bazaar). Coinbase's official x402 service directory, launched May 15, 2026. Over 36,000 services indexed. Agents query it programmatically through the CDP Bazaar Discovery API. Every x402 service that correctly declares its schema and processes a valid payment gets indexed automatically. Bloomberg, CoinGecko, The G...