Most x402 marketplace traffic comes from the marketplace's own checks and directory indexers

A 24-hour census of one live x402 catalogue found that only about a fifth of its 117,272 requests came from the marketplace's own machines, with the rest mostly from external clients. The largest single source was a third-party directory repeatedly checking whether endpoints were still live, which the author describes as maintenance rather than customer demand. Of the 98,278 HTTP 402 responses, the author notes they show the payment gate answering, not buyers paying. Only two outside requests received a successful response from a paid endpoint, both from settlement probes by public directories. The author also found that classifying callers by their self-declared User-Agent misclassified both the marketplace's own sweeps and some of its hosts, so address-based classification is more reliable.