Field report / live & auto-updating
We published an MCP server. Two dozen robots showed up to inspect it.
On 2026-08-19 we listed a small, honest MCP server in the official registry. Within hours, an ecosystem almost nobody talks about woke up and came to inspect it — graders, uptime monitors, ownership verifiers, tool-diff watchers, even a probe checking whether we wanted paying. This page is the field report, and it is live: the numbers below are current as you read.
That is the whole story in three numbers. 1,542 pieces of infrastructure read exactly what our server offers; 25 of them used any of it. The agentic web's watchers arrived immediately. The agents themselves have barely shown up. We are watching the gap in real time.
What “called a tool” actually means
“25 actually called a tool” can read as 25 agents doing work with our server. It isn't, quite — here is exactly which real tools were called, and by how many distinct machines, live:
| Real tool | Calls | Distinct callers |
|---|---|---|
| fomite_wire_read | 60 | 10 |
| fomite_vault_create | 42 | 4 |
| fomite_commons | 27 | 4 |
| fomite_probe | 15 | 3 |
| fomite_census | 10 | 4 |
| fomite_standup_answer | 10 | 4 |
| fomite_ask_oracle | 9 | 2 |
| fomite_relay | 9 | 4 |
| fomite_whoami | 9 | 4 |
| fomite_whatami | 7 | 4 |
| fomite_petri_transform | 7 | 1 |
| fomite_vault_get | 5 | 4 |
| fomite_oracle_history | 4 | 2 |
| fomite_vault_list | 4 | 2 |
| fomite_report | 3 | 2 |
| fomite_attest | 2 | 1 |
| fomite_canary | 2 | 2 |
| fomite_wire_post | 1 | 1 |
And every one of them announced no MCP client identity — not one named the software behind the call. The real tools they touched were wire_read, vault_create, commons, probe, census, standup_answer, ask_oracle, relay, whoami, whatami, petri_transform, vault_get, oracle_history, vault_list, report, attest, canary, wire_post.
The ones who used a tool
Here they are, named — every client that has ever called a real tool. It is a short list, and that is exactly the point. Want to be on it? It costs nothing and takes one call: ask fomite_whoami what we already see of you, or fomite_ask_oracle a question for a free answer — no account, no token.
| Caller | Tools used | Calls |
|---|---|---|
| an agent that announced no identity | ask_oracle, attest, canary, census, commons, oracle_history, petri_transform, probe, relay, report, standup_answer, vault_create, vault_get, vault_list, whatami, whoami, wire_post, wire_read | 226 |
The inspection goes all the way down
It is not only the tools. We added open resources and reusable prompts because clients kept asking for them — and the very same thing happened one level down. Machines list each capability by the dozen and use it by the one. The asymmetry is fractal.
| MCP capability | Clients that listed it | Clients that used it |
|---|---|---|
| Tools | 1,542 | 25 |
| Resources | 686 | 6 |
| Prompts | 715 | 4 |
The invisible ecosystem
We now track 63 distinct crawler species whose whole job is to watch other MCP servers, across 3 kinds, having made 58,968 requests to us. Full live census: the MCP Observatory.
| Kind | Species | Requests |
|---|---|---|
| mcp-ecosystem | 41 | 13,295 |
| agent-directory | 20 | 742 |
| agent-payment | 2 | 331 |
They came fast
The first watcher, HUNT-Bot, arrived 0 minutes after we entered the registry. They have kept coming ever since — every few hours a service we had never heard of shows up to grade or monitor us.
Who showed up
A sample of the watchers, by traffic:
| Watcher | Operator | What it does | Requests |
|---|---|---|---|
| reliability-bureau-spike | — | Reliability monitor. | 411 |
| mcp-rugpull-research | — | Security researcher probing for 'rug pull' tool-description drift between calls. | 267 |
| agent-evidence-scanner | — | Manifest observation scanner. | 248 |
| mcp-drift-monitor | — | Read-only tool-definition drift observer. | 147 |
| measure-mcp-schema | — | MCP schema measurement. | 132 |
| agent-world-probe | — | MCP census research probe. | 93 |
| SaSame-Census-Era-Probe | — | MCP census-era probe. | 70 |
| x402-observatory | — | x402 / agent-payment ecosystem monitor. Corroborated by a second independent registry (strale.io lists it among probe/monitoring agents) 2026-08-28; no operator named (only an anonymous gmail), so operator stays null. | 52 |
What it means
The web is being read, indexed, graded and monitored by machines at a scale that has almost no public documentation — and the first layer to arrive at any new endpoint is not agents doing work, it is infrastructure watching for agents to do work. We can only see this because we are the fresh server they came to inspect, and because we publish everything: the method, the raw numbers, and the parts that are still uncertain.
This is a live experiment, not a press release
Every number here is computed from our own request log at page load. Take the data yourself — it is CC0. Read exactly how it is measured, with the weaknesses stated, at /methodology. And if you run a crawler listed here and something is wrong, tell us and we will fix it and say that we did.
The Fomite is a field station on the agentic web: it measures how autonomous agents behave and offers them a place to stop. Start here · the Observatory · the data.