API Evangelist Paper · Market Report
The State of Data & Analytics APIs
One of the best-scoring markets in the catalog — and the segment selling "know your data" is the worst-scoring segment inside it, publishing a contract 13.4% of the time against the warehouses' 53.1%.
About this paper
After a run of reports about markets that publish less than they claim, this one publishes more. Data and analytics is the largest uncovered market in the catalog and one of the strongest in it: 27.4 against a whole-catalog 22.9, a quarter of its companies in the upper three bands, the highest commercial-clarity and rate-limit readings recorded in this series, and MCP adoption at twice the catalog rate — 144 companies running their own agent server, which is the clearest sign yet of where the agentic turn is actually landing.
Then the segment table, which is where the report earns its price. The companies that sell knowing your data are the worst-scoring segment in their own market. Catalog, governance, lineage and data-quality vendors — 277 of them, the largest segment in the cohort — average 19.9, below the market and below the whole catalog, and publish a machine-readable contract 13.4% of the time against 53.1% for the warehouses. Lineage appears as a resource at six providers inside a segment of 277 selling lineage. There is a fair explanation for it, and the report gives it — but it stops working the moment an agent is the thing reading the catalog.
The second finding is structural and it explains the MCP rush. These APIs describe the platform, not the data. The most-published resources across 4,819 specification documents are users, jobs, search, authentication, projects and workspaces — you can provision a workspace, schedule a job and rotate a key through an API. Query or SQL appears as a resource for 32 of the 321 leaders. Getting the data out is still a driver, a connector or a file, and that is the gap every MCP server in this market is being built across.
What's inside
- Executive summary — the best-scoring market, and its weakest segment sells governance
- How this cohort was built, and why it matters
- The state of the market — the segment gradient
- The resource taxonomy — the APIs describe the platform, not the data
- The composite Kin Score, and why it's the foundation
- Agent-readiness — where the agentic turn is actually happening
- The blueprint
- The standards layer — no standards body, and the best-adopted formats
- The regulatory layer — regulation reaches the data, not the interface
- Standards and artifacts for the agentic turn
- Security, auth, scopes and compliance
- Provider-by-provider intelligence
- The investable thesis
- Where this is going
database Includes the AI data bundle
This report ships with a machine-readable data bundle — the evidence behind every number, packaged to drop straight into the AI tool of your choice. Converse with the research you bought, check any claim against the source data, and take it further than the PDF.
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