Pulse
What did the tracked agent economy actually do?
Pulse answers that in a weekly note, in plain language, from our own verified data. Each post is a dated document: its figures are checked against the live data on the day it ships and recorded in a public claims ledger. The live pages keep updating; Pulse posts stay put — every number in them recomputable from public chain data.
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2026-10-13
Newegg checkout goes live inside Google’s AI
Newegg checkout went live inside Google AI Mode and Gemini, TikTok said it is building one-click buying and a shopping agent, and x402 payments on Solana can now be batched. Our readout: 17.7% more dollars from fewer payments and far fewer payers.
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2026-10-06
Shopify opens checkout to browser agents
Shopify opened checkout to browser-based AI agents and Cloudflare put a pay-per-request gateway for agents into closed beta. Robinhood announced trading agents. Our on-chain readout is back: more payments, fewer dollars, and one two-cent tool took over half of all payments.
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2026-09-30
Checkout pages get agent tools
Stripe switched on named actions for browser agents across its checkout pages on 2026-09-22. Meta's Muse added Shop Pay, PayPal and ten named retailers, and Amazon began blocking it. Four reporters' tests of Muse had mixed results. Our own on-chain readout is still paused.
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2026-09-14
Meta and Salesforce shipped consumer shopping agents this week; an independent test found Meta's Muse books real flights but simulates hotel and car reservations. Our own weekly on-chain readout is paused for a database rebuild.
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2026-09-04
Twice the payments, half the ticket
Over a bootstrap 4.5-day window, the sellers we track were paid about twice as often as the week before, and the average payment shrank from $3.50 to $2.26 — more payments, smaller payments, in the categories where agents make lots of tiny purchases.
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2026-09-02
The busiest tracked day in five weeks was mostly dust: thousands of near-zero payments moving about thirteen dollars in total, while verified volume stayed ordinary.
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What belongs in a Pulse post?
One observation a week from the tracked catalog, told so a newcomer can follow it: what moved, what it means, and how to recompute it. The agent economy is growing, and part of what grows is noise — Pulse exists to keep the two readable apart. No forecasts, no winners declared, no urgency.
For today's figures, go to the market dashboard, the rankings, or the directory. For one answer a week to each of eight standing questions, see the weekly statistics. New to all of this? Start at Learn.