Google Updates Universal Commerce Protocol to Make AI Shopping Work More Like Human Browsing

AI shopping gets simpler with Universal Commerce Protocol updates

We built the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) with the industry as an open standard to help make online shopping easier for everyone. Today, we're sharing updates on new UCP capabilities, and, separately, how we are simplifying the UCP onboarding experience on Google surfaces. Since launch, we've worked with community contributors to add new optional capabilities to the protocol: As always, UCP adopters can customize the experience they provide by selecting which capabilities to support. At Google, we'll continue to bring relevant UCP capabilities to shopping experiences in AI Mode in Search, the Gemini app and beyond. Additionally, we are actively working to onboard more retailers of all sizes to agentic experiences on Google with a simplified UCP onboarding process in Google's Merchant Center, rolling out over the coming months. Partners like Commerce Inc, Salesforce and Stripe will implement UCP on their platforms in the near future, with others coming soon -- making online shopping and selling even better for more people and businesses.

Google Debuts New Ways to Let AI Agents Shop Like Humans | PYMNTS.com

Since then, the tech giant said on its blog Thursday (March 19), the company has worked with "community contributors" on new options for the UCP. Among these is a new "Cart" option that lets agents save or add multiple items to a shopping cart at the same time from a single store, "just as a shopper typically would." In addition, UCP adopters will be able to access a new Catalog capability that allows AI agents -- when necessary -- to retrieve select real-time product details from a merchant catalog such as variants, inventory and pricing. And building on existing standards, UCP will also support Identity Linking, Google added. "That allows shoppers on UCP-integrated platforms to receive the same loyalty or member benefits they would on a retailer's site when they're logged in -- like pricing or free shipping -- making shopping more connected across the web," the company said. Google announced UPC in January after developing the protocol in partnership with Walmart, Target, Shopify, Etsy and Wayfair. As PYMNTS wrote, the protocol moves away from relying on one-off integrations between agents and merchants and comes up with a standard way for AI agents to handle product discovery, checkout and post-purchase support. Merchants can expose inventory, pricing and fulfillment logic via the protocol, thus letting agents carry out purchases without redirecting users to external sites. "The transition from traditional web or app search to agent-led commerce represents the next great evolution in retail. We aren't just watching the shift, we are driving it," John Furner, who was then on the cusp of becoming Walmart's CEO, said at the time. Meanwhile, PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster wrote earlier this week about the core challenge facing agentic commerce in this stage of its life. These models, she argued, are "breathtakingly amazing" at helping consumers research and shortlist their options. However, the infrastructure needed to actually curate all of the available options, and then complete the purchase, is a big gap that hasn't yet been filled. "What is billed as a revolution in commerce is, for now, mostly a highly intelligent search bar. A better one than Google. A more conversational one," Webster wrote. "But still, at its core, a tool that finds the answer and then hands the consumer off to someone else to close the deal."