Google is adding significant new capabilities to its Universal Commerce Protocol, the open standard designed to allow artificial intelligence shopping agents to interact with retailer systems in the way a human customer would, rather than scraping product pages or relying on static data feeds.
The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is a set of rules that defines how AI agents communicate with retailer platforms, covering everything from product discovery to purchase completion, with the aim of making those interactions consistent and reliable enough for merchants to support at scale.
The update introduces three substantive additions.
A Cart capability allows an agent to add multiple products from a single retailer to a shopping basket in a single action, removing the step-by-step interaction that currently slows automated purchasing workflows and makes multi-item orders cumbersome for AI agents to complete.
A catalogue capability gives agents the ability to query retailer systems directly for real-time product data, including available variants, current inventory levels and live pricing, rather than relying on information that may be hours or days out of date.
Identity Linking allows shoppers who are already authenticated on a UCP-integrated platform to receive the same loyalty benefits they would get by visiting a retailer's own site, including member pricing and free delivery thresholds, addressing one of the more practical barriers to AI-assisted shopping that loyalty scheme fragmentation currently creates.
Retailers can choose which of these optional capabilities to implement, giving smaller merchants the ability to adopt the protocol incrementally rather than overhauling their entire e-commerce infrastructure at once.
Google said it plans to integrate relevant UCP features across Search in AI Mode, the Gemini app and other surfaces over the coming months, and is building a simplified onboarding flow inside Google Merchant Center to reduce the technical overhead for new adopters.
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Commerce Inc, Salesforce and Stripe are expected to implement UCP on their platforms in the near future, a set of partnerships that would give the standard meaningful reach into existing merchant technology stacks.
Ashish Gupta, Google's vice president and general manager of merchant shopping, described UCP as an industry-built open standard aimed at making online shopping easier for everyone.
The recap
- Google expands the Universal Commerce Protocol with new capabilities.
- Catalog feature lets agents fetch variants, inventory and pricing.
- Merchant Center onboarding will roll out simplified process over months.
