API Evangelist Paper · Standard Report
The AsyncAPI Standard
Across 26,722 providers, exactly one publishes an AsyncAPI document — and 159 describe their events in OpenAPI instead. In its own strongest segment, AsyncAPI is losing 159 to one.
About this paper
Every other report in this series measures what implementers published. This one measures something rarer, and the rarity is the finding.
Across 26,722 providers in the APIs.io catalog, exactly one publishes an AsyncAPI document that was harvested as it was served. One — against 7,038 as-published OpenAPI archives. What the catalog holds beside it is 739 documents covering 674 providers, authored by API Evangelist from those providers’ own webhook and streaming documentation, describing 4,856 channels.
The one that shipped is the story. It belongs to Xquik, and it exists because an API Evangelist review named a typed event surface as a dimension they already satisfied in substance and could claim truthfully in form. Days later they published a good AsyncAPI 3.1.0 document. The barrier is not conviction, and it is not tooling. It is that nobody asks.
The events are not undescribed, and that is the sharper finding. A webhook can be described in OpenAPI too — 3.1 added a webhooks object — and 159 providers do exactly that, 114 via webhooks across 2,682 events and 46 via callbacks. So the API economy has not refused to describe its event surfaces. It reaches for OpenAPI when it does, and in the segment AsyncAPI was built for, the published score is 159 to one.
The specification is good and the project is, on every institutional measure available here, in better health than the OpenAPI Initiative — more contributors, more volume, less concentration, a quarter of its ecosystem’s tooling maintained in-house, and governance published as machine-readable YAML rather than prose that went stale. The protocols tell the TSC something useful and unexpected: websockets and webhooks account for 999 server declarations against 58 for every message broker combined, and the websocket has now moved ahead of the webhook — which is the one segment no rival specification describes at all.
What's inside
- Executive summary — displacement, not absence
- The one that shipped
- The provenance disclosure — read this before any corpus number
- The event surfaces that actually exist
- What the body publishes, and how it is governed
- Version reality — and why it is not read as adoption
- The adoption gap
- Conformance
- The regulatory layer, and why agents change this
- The scoring caveat
- What would have to be true
- 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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What you get
These papers are experience-based and vendor-neutral, distilled from the API Evangelist research at apievangelist.com. Every API Evangelist Standard Report is free to download. Found something wrong, or an artifact this report missed? [email protected] — pointing at an artifact is the fastest way to change the next version.
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