Google unveils Universal Commerce Protocol for agentic shopping

Speaking at the National Retail Federation’s annual conference, Sundar Pichai announced the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard for letting AI agents discover products, compare offers and complete purchases directly with merchants. Google said it had built the protocol together with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart, with more than twenty further retailers endorsing it, and released it as available immediately.

UCP was pitched as connective infrastructure sitting alongside existing agent standards — Google described it as compatible with Agent2Agent, the Agent Payments Protocol and the Model Context Protocol — rather than a replacement for them, aimed specifically at the handoff between a shopper’s conversation with an AI agent and a completed transaction with a merchant’s systems. In Google’s own products, that meant native checkout inside Search’s AI Mode and Gemini: a shopper could be offered a personalised promotion, loyalty enrolment or a completed purchase through Google Pay without leaving the chat interface, while Google said merchants would retain control over the customer relationship.

The announcement placed Google alongside a wider push by AI companies and payment networks to define the plumbing for “agentic commerce” — AI systems that shop and pay on a user’s behalf — before any single company’s standard became the default. As with earlier agent protocols, adoption by merchants and rival platforms, rather than the technical design itself, would determine whether UCP became the standard Google intended.