---
title: Why we publish the funnel
date: 2026-05-18
summary: The first post on the Agenstry blog — why a registry that hides its discovery funnel can't be trusted, and what we publish instead.
author: "Sebastiaan Hilbers"
hero_glyph: funnel
---

Most agent registries publish a count. **11,738 agents indexed.** It looks like
abundance, but it's actually opacity: you have no way to tell how many of those
agents respond, how many serve a valid card, how many are dead.

We publish the funnel instead:

- **{discovered}** discovered across federated sources
- **{responded}** responded to a probe in the last 24 hours
- **{actually work}** returned a valid, schema-conforming card

Every step is reproducible from public data. If our number disagrees with yours,
one of us has a bug — and we'd like to know.

## What you'll find on this blog

Three kinds of posts, no announcements:

1. **Methodology notes.** When we change how a criterion is scored, we'll write
   up why, what the failure mode was, and what we expect to see in the next
   month of data.
2. **Field reports.** Things we learn from running a probe against ~12k agents
   that the spec authors couldn't have predicted. Most of them are the
   not-fun kind.
3. **Interop receipts.** Side-by-side card diffs when A2A or MCP servers move
   between versions, with a fixed-width breakdown of what changed and what
   broke.

If you came here for a "we raised a Series A" post, you're in the wrong place.
We have a 9-criterion methodology to maintain.