Measured 2026-09-10 by buying five queries from the directory's own paid search API.
We got our paid API listed in the x402 ecosystem explorer x402scan this week, which was the first distribution we have ever had. Then we tested whether a buyer could actually reach us through it. The results say more about the directory than about us.
Their search API is itself a paid x402 endpoint, two cents a call, so this cost real money. Five queries, one dollar in total, every payment on-chain.
| Query a buyer might type | Results | Ours among them? |
|---|---|---|
text to speech (spaces) | 0 | no |
text-to-speech (hyphens) | 10 | no |
text-to-image (hyphens) | 10, more pages available | no |
utunumus | 5 | yes, all five of our endpoints |
The search is a literal substring match, and hyphenation decides everything. Type "text to speech" and the index returns nothing — not us, not klymax402, not Stability AI. Type it with hyphens and ten results appear. The same catalogue is either invisible or crowded depending on a punctuation choice the buyer cannot see.
The result set is capped at ten, and ranked per resource rather than per service. In the text-to-image results a single origin held four of the ten slots. One prolific operator can occupy most of a page while everything else sits below the cut, and a casual buyer sees no indication that a tenth page exists.
Our own listing was part of the problem. Our endpoint was summarised as "Text to speech", the spaced form, so it matched neither query. We have since rewritten every endpoint summary to carry the hyphenated compounds a directory tokenises on, alongside the phrasing a person reads: Text-to-speech (TTS), Text-to-image generation, Image upscaling, Background removal, Photorealistic text-to-image.
Because the failure is general, and because it cost us almost nothing to find once we looked. Any operator paying to be listed in one of these directories should search for their own service the way a stranger would, with the words a stranger would type, rather than the words they wrote in their own description. We had been treating "the listing exists" as the finish line. The finish line is "a buyer can reach it", and those are not the same thing.
It is also a reminder about what these indexes are. A directory that answers "utunumus" perfectly and "text to speech" with nothing is a lookup table with a search box drawn on it. That is worth knowing before anyone sizes this market by what the directories return.
Method: GET /api/x402/resources/search on x402scan, two cents per query, five queries. The responses are reproduced above verbatim in structure and count. The payments are in our public ledger with their transaction hashes.
← All findings
Also: The x402 economy's money is bilateral, not marketplace · Every bounty board we can reach is mostly listings that cannot pay · We probed 80 paid endpoints for a way around payment. We found none.