WAWhat AI agents pay for

How a payment gets a category

The categories are a fixed list used by the index, not a taxonomy the protocols themselves emit. x402 settlement logs have a buyer, a seller, an amount, and a facilitator. They do not have a field for "search" or "inference." The label comes from the Bazaar, Coinbase's catalog of payment-gated resources, which this index crawls hourly.

A database job then classifies new or changed services. A keyword heuristic always runs. A model runs only when it is configured, and only under a daily cap. A community override file can correct a row. Precedence is manual, then community, then the model, then the heuristic. The job is not part of chain ingest. A payment can settle before its URL is classified, and it can settle without ever appearing in the catalog.

Volume is joined through the seller, the payTo address. Every resource that pays that address contributes its category. The live table uses the 7 day window. Each linked row is the use-case page for that slug.

What the categories mean

The names match the classifier. They are descriptions of the service text, not of the buyer's intent.

• AI inference and LLM covers model calls, chat completions, and embeddings.
• Search covers web, document, or semantic search.
• Web scraping and crawling covers page fetch, crawl, and browser extraction.
• Data APIs covers structured data, enrichment, and reference feeds.
• Trading, DeFi, and market data covers prices, swaps, and market feeds.
• Media covers image, video, speech, and music generation.
• Paywalled content and news covers articles and other paid reading.
• Compute and storage covers GPU, sandboxes, and object storage.
• Identity and verification covers attestation and verification services.
• Agent tooling and MCP covers agent tools, MCP servers, and orchestration.
• Other is a service that matched the catalog and matched none of the names above.
• Unclassified is settled volume with no classified service attached. It is a gap in coverage, not a kind of product.

Pay per call, recurring, and high frequency

Pay-per-call is both an x402 behavior and a residual label in this rollup. The default x402 HTTP flow charges for the request in front of it. The use-case job marks a service as something else only in two cases. Recurring means at least 20 calls in the catalog window, from no more than three payers, with at least 30 calls per payer. High frequency means at least 10,000 calls in 30 days and a listed price under $0.01.

Those patterns do not change the dollars. They describe how the catalog says the endpoint is used. An MPP session can meter tokens or seconds and settle in batches. That settlement is still MPP volume. It is not rewritten into one x402 call per voucher. Micropayments and Circle's nanopayments show up here as small settled amounts, not as their own category.

How to read the numbers

Share is the category's settled volume divided by 7 day settled volume, not by organic volume alone. The coverage sentence on the table says what fraction of that volume matched any Bazaar service. A low share for a famous use case can mean the catalog has not linked the payees, not that the use case is small.

Payers overlap across sellers. Transactions do not. A seller who fails the organic screen can still appear in a category, because the category is built from settlement plus catalog match. Organic status is on the seller pages. The methodology page is the versioned description of both cuts.

If a category has no link, the rollup did not return a row for it in this dataset. The index page at /use-case is the live list. Do not treat a missing row as a measured zero unless the table prints a zero.