Issue #06 of The Demand Report went out this morning. It is the weekly newsletter we write out of apis.io’s own logs — what people and agents actually typed into the search box and asked of the MCP server in the last seven days, published as a demand signal for the API economy.
Nobody else has this data, which is the entire reason the newsletter exists.
What is in every issue
| Section | What it is |
|---|---|
| The Demand Report | The week’s search volume, broken out by tier and by surface, with the machine traffic separated from the people |
| The Gaps | The zero-result queries — what people searched for and the catalog could not answer |
| New to the Index | The providers and APIs that landed in the last seven days |
| Rated This Week | One provider read against the Kin Score facets, with every claim verified at the source |
| Reproduce this yourself | The MCP calls and curl lines that regenerate the issue’s central claim |
Six issues since July 6, every Monday, roughly a ten-minute read.
What six issues have actually turned up
The headline number is usually a lie. Issue #03 opened with 123,498 searches and then spent the issue dismantling it — 118,232 of those were the site calling itself. Real outside demand was 5,266. We printed both, because a platform instrumenting itself with the same counters it uses for customers is the easiest way in the world to be wrong about your own traffic.
Agent traffic is real and it plateaued in public. The weekly MCP series across the run reads 35 → 42 → 310 → 1,027 → 518 → 1,924 → 2,768 → 2,508. Issue #05 led on one in sixteen searches being an agent. Issue #06 reported the 9.4% decline off that record without dressing it up as anything else.
Last week, something went after the permission layer. Gated-resource attempts hit security 2,803 times and scopes 1,055 times — 3,858 against two endpoints whose combined total for the seven prior weeks was twenty. The pivot is a scarcity ratio you can pull yourself: 23,676 of 26,891 providers publish a Security artifact, and only 2,459 publish Scopes. The crawler went hardest at the scarcest layer in the catalog — the one that says what a credential is allowed to do.
The gap list is the part providers should read
Every week the pipeline produces a set of unmet terms, and every week we re-probe all one hundred published zero-result queries against the live API before printing them. Last week that meant 1,341 raw terms, 951 of them a single caller walking an English dictionary through the search box, 390 genuinely unmet — and of the top hundred, fourteen that now return results and eighty-six that still do not.
Those eighty-six are people who wanted something specific and left with nothing. Last week’s sharpest was Maasstroom Energie G1 — G1 is a generating unit at a 426 MW plant outside Rotterdam. Somebody wanted per-unit generation data by unit code. Four of the eight published gaps were typed as bare hostnames, and the geography keeps landing outside the English-speaking tech centres.
If one of those lanes is yours, the fix takes about two minutes: apis.io/add.
Read the data without us
The underlying numbers are public and refresh every Monday at apis.io/search-terms/. The scarcity claim above is two free MCP calls:
find_providers(artifact_types=["Security"], limit=1, fields=["slug"])
find_providers(artifact_types=["Scopes"], limit=1, fields=["slug"])
Read meta.total on each. The newsletter is the reading; the data is yours either way.
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