Who Is Actually Running Agentic Buys: A Sourced Ledger

Agentic buying is real, it is eight months old, and it is smaller than one large publisher’s monthly revenue. Eight named deployments have transacted since December 2025. Exactly one advertiser has put its name to any of them. Three produced a number anybody could quote, all three of those numbers came from a company that sells agentic software, and that last fact decides how you read every case study you will be shown this year.

The buys that have actually run

Three names carry the protocol column. AdCP, the Ad Context Protocol, is the buying-and-selling spec most of these deployments run on. AAMP is IAB Tech Lab’s competing framework, and the two are compared here. A row marked MCP means the agents had a way to talk to each other and no published buy-side spec governed the commercial content of what they said.

A row qualifies when a named company is on the record, with a date, that something transacted. Current as of 12 August 2026.

Eight rows, three different units. Two are platforms reporting aggregate volume: PubMatic AgenticOS and Magnite Orchestration. One is a seller-agent integration with named test buys behind it, Magnite and Scope3 inside SpringServe. The other five are discrete campaigns or buy programmes, where a brief went in and media came out. Eight is the number a vendor will quote at you. Five is the number that means something ran.

Two threads on r/programmatic have been asking for that list. One put it bluntly: “Literally give me one example of an advertiser actually using either.” The other, from January, drew this: “I have no reason to believe that it’s anything more than just another buzzword until i see some solid tangible examples. Otherwise, blockchain sandbox NFT IOT flying cars.” The closest either thread got to an answer was one publisher saying they had started integrating on the sell side with Magnite.

That standard undercounts, and in one place the size of the undercount is knowable. PubMatic’s Harry Tong told Digiday the company is running tests with “upwards of 10” agency partners and declined to name any of them. The public ledger is a floor, not a census.

The ledger also has a hole where the biggest buyers should be. Yahoo’s DSP is in it. The Trade Desk is in the second table and goes no further than alpha. Google’s DV360, Amazon DSP and Meta appear in neither table, and no public agentic deployment exists from any of the three. The platforms that spend most of the world’s programmatic money have published nothing that would fill a row, and on a proof-of-deployment list that absence is worth more than most of the rows.

Shipped the infrastructure, no campaign to point at

Real products. No advertiser has been named on any of them.

Almost every number above was produced by the company that sold the campaign

PubMatic’s AgenticOS ran the Butler/Till buy and PubMatic’s supply chain carried it. The 5.5x compares that path against what the two companies call the standard economics of traditional DSPs, and it gets much more useful when you take it apart. PubMatic’s own case study puts the same result at about an 80% reduction in buy-side costs. Digiday reports 82%, specifically in DSP tech fees. 5.5x is one divided by 0.18: the identical number restated as a multiple, by the company that removed the fee.

That is the disintermediation thesis, proved and priced, and it settles one half of the argument the trade press has been having with itself. Paul Bannister of Raptive has been the clearest voice for the optimistic case, arguing that agentic trading “puts the buyer directly in touch with the publisher’s ad server and removes other middlemen”. On fees, the Butler/Till result is his evidence and it is good evidence. Craig Tuck of Ozone says the “biggest risk we see with an innovation like AdCP is decreasing transparency and control”, and this ledger is his evidence too. The fee came out of a supply chain only PubMatic can see, the saving was published by the party that charged the fee, and nobody outside PubMatic can reconstruct why those particular impressions were bought. Bannister wins the fee argument. Tuck wins the one that decides whether you can audit next year’s spend, and he wins it on Bannister’s own case study.

It is also the limit of what the number says. Removing a DSP fee is a supply-chain result, not an agent result, and nobody has isolated the agentic layer inside it. The budget was never disclosed either, so from outside you cannot tell whether 40% more impressions than planned is agent optimisation or simply what a 30% lower effective CPM buys you on the same money. That 30% is in PubMatic’s own case study and it travelled the least of any figure in the set, which is odd, because it is the one a planner would care about most.

So the number to carry into a business case is zero. Model your pilot at no media saving at all. If a fee really comes out, it shows up in your own reconciliation and costs you nothing to have not forecast; forecast it from somebody else’s press release and you have committed to a saving whose mechanism you cannot inspect.

The quality numbers are the exception in this ledger, and the two outlets that reported them disagree. Marketing Dive, working from press materials, published under 1% DoubleVerify failure and 0% made-for-advertising. Digiday reported that an independent audit by the verification firm Jounce found an MFA rate below 1%, with 80% of the inventory rated higher than DoubleVerify’s typical benchmark. Two outlets, two different numbers, one campaign, and no way from outside to tell which figure Jounce actually produced. Digiday’s version is the stronger claim precisely because it is the one place in this entire ledger where a third party looked at an agentic campaign and measured something.

The deal counts have the same shape and a weaker defence. 4,000 AI-powered deals transacted to date is a count of deals; the spend behind them has never been published, and the figure is an unaudited operating metric in an earnings release. What is useful in it is the curve, 250 to 1,000 to 4,000 across two quarters, which is real acceleration in something. The absolute number still tells you almost nothing about money.

Five rows in the first table say none published. NBCUniversal, Omnicom, Yahoo and Vox Media have all confirmed live transactions and not one has published a performance delta. The reasons could be commercial as easily as unflattering, since agencies and holding companies almost never publish client-level results for any tactic. But a delta is the thing that would settle the argument, and eight months in, nobody has produced one.

Nothing has gone wrong either, on the public record. No pulled campaign, no rerun, no agent that mispriced a buy, no integration that stalled with a name attached to it. Every row here is a success or a silence, which is exactly what a ledger assembled from press releases would look like whether or not the failures exist.

The one number that came from outside the trade

DataBeat, a programmatic analytics provider working with the revenue-operations firm MediaMint, published its US Programmatic Trends report on 22 June 2026 using May 2026 marketplace data: more than 55 million dollars of monthly revenue, 35 billion monthly impressions, over 200 bidders. It is the only agentic-versus-conventional comparison in circulation that was not written by a party to the campaigns it describes.

Independent of the campaigns is not the same as disinterested. DataBeat had no stake in the buys it measured and it has a direct stake in you reading the report: it sells analytics into this market, the report is monthly marketing, and its own conclusion is that agentic buying has moved past the experimental stage and stands to become a larger contributor to publisher monetisation. The numbers are still worth having, because they are the only ones of their kind.

Conventional buyers paid a 13.4% CPM premium, which reads either as agents avoiding overpayment or as agents winning inventory conventional demand had already declined. The fill rate would settle it if it were sound: an 11.5% relative edge between two fractions of one percent is not load-bearing, DataBeat never defines how either rate was derived, and ppc.land points out that a conventional fill rate measured the usual way runs far above 1%, so whatever these two numbers are, they are not that. Take them at face value anyway, pair them with 86% fewer auctions, and the unflattering reading fits better than the flattering one: curated, pre-negotiated supply does not clear at a fifth of one percent, and bidding rarely into thin competition does. DataBeat itself hedges that it is worth assessing whether the edge comes from inventory quality or from win-rate optimisation. It is one network for one month, and still the only outside look anyone has published.

Where is AAMP in this ledger?

AAMP has one row here and it belongs to an agency, not an advertiser. IAB Tech Lab’s Agent Registry opened on 1 March 2026 and reached ten entries by 11 March, every one of them registered as an MCP server and none as A2A, the agent-to-agent transport that competes with MCP. PMG connected Alli to the buyer agent architecture on 7 April. Kochava shipped an open-source workspace on it, Amazon Ads donated a bidstream component, and Google, The Trade Desk, Amazon and Meta are all named as members. No advertiser has spent money through AAMP in public.

So if a vendor is selling you AAMP compliance in 2026, they are selling you a roster. Every buy in the first table above ran on AdCP or on raw MCP.

The entire market is still a rounding error

Michael Barrett, Magnite’s chief executive, told an interviewer in July 2026 that the most optimistic forecasts he collected at Cannes put total 2027 agentic ad spend at 600 to 700 million dollars, and on the August earnings call he widened the range of answers he gets from customers to “0 to 1 billion dollars for the whole industry”. Magnite alone processes about 9 billion dollars of ad spend a year, which is roughly 170 million dollars a week. The top of Barrett’s own industry-wide forecast for 2027 is four weeks of Magnite’s pipe.

There is no urgency argument in those numbers, and I would not let a vendor build one for you out of a deal count. The case for running something this year is optionality: you learn what your own supply chain costs when a machine assembles it, at a budget you can afford to lose. What a defensible first pilot looks like is a separate question from whether the market is real yet.

Three questions for the next vendor call

Who is on both sides of the trade? Run that on the next vendor who shows you a number. When one company supplies the buying agent and carries the supply, the saving it reports is the saving from removing a fee it was already positioned to remove, and that can be entirely honest while saying nothing about what the agent is worth to you.

What was the budget, and did anything run against it? Every published figure so far is measured against a counterfactual, never a control. Ask for the control instead: same budget, same weeks, same market, bought the old way. Nobody has published one, so a vendor who offers to run one alongside your pilot is telling you more than the 5.5x does.

Then ask to speak to the advertiser. There is one. Geloso Beverage Group is the only brand that has let its name go on a transacting deployment since December; Level Agency is an agency and Vox Media is a publisher, and all three were put into a press release by the vendor that served them, so a reference call costs that vendor nothing if the campaign happened the way the release says it did.

One thing worth raising on that call, because both campaigns get described as fully agentic: in the Butler/Till buy a person signed off the curated inventory, and at Vox a person accepted the buy in the ad server before it launched.

The mechanism checks underneath all of this, including whether a vendor’s agent answers on the same version the spec publishes, which is 3.1.13 in dist/schemas/latest.json, are on questions to ask an agentic advertising vendor.