Agents mentioned PayPal 139 times, picked it 0 times: software distribution is changing

Armature ran 5,300 sandbox sessions where Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor integrated payment and email tools into real engineering repos. PayPal got 139 mentions and zero code commits; Stripe won 88% of payment tests. Tool choice follows language stack: the same email task picked Resend in TypeScript, SendGrid in Python, Postmark in Go, and Azure ACS in Java. Big markets concentrate heavily; long-tail categories split three ways across agents. Armature sells agent-adoption optimization starting at $5,000/month and disclosed the conflict upfront. The post doesn't spell out how the 42% selection-consistency figure was calculated; our own recomputation across reasonable definitions landed at 41.5%–48.2%, consistent with the published number. Agent tool selection is a context-dependent function, not a global ranking—traditional SEO logic breaks here.