Google launches suite of agentic commerce tools for customers and retailers

Google has unveiled suite of new shopping capabilities that have the power to transform a simple ecommerce journey for both consumers and retailers, with three new tools across Search, Google Ads, and Gemini. 

The announcement was made a little more than three months after OpenAI announced ChatGPT's Instant Checkout feature allowing shoppers to complete purchases inside chats. 

Google’s first innovation is a new protocol that allows customers to pay for goods they buy from eligible US-based retailers as they’re researching on Google. Initially, the new shopping features will work on eligible Google product listings in AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app. 

These capabilities are enabled by a new protocol, Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), which Google described as “a new open standard for agentic commerce that works across the entire shopping journey”. It was co-developed in collaboration with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart, and has been endorsed by more than 20 other brands including Adyen, American Express, Best Buy, Flipkart, Macy’s Inc., Mastercard, Stripe, The Home Depot, Visa, and Zalando.

Promising a “new era of shopping powered by AI”, Google’s statement on the launch began: “The pace of innovation in retail is incredible, and agentic commerce – where AI completes tasks on people’s behalf – is evolving from a concept to reality.”

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What is Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)?

Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is an open-source standard, developed to power generative AI shopping and agentic commerce. 

In creating a protocol for AI-powered shopping, Google has established a common language for computers and agents to use, meaning it can rapidly roll out its new capabilities across a wide range of retailers easier than it would with a dedicated new AI-powered shopping feature or product. UCP specifically allows agents and systems to operate together across consumer surfaces, businesses, and payment providers. This means that instead of requiring unique connections for every individual agent, UCP enables all agents to easily interact as they speak the same language. 

On the technical details, Google explained UCP is built to work across verticals and is compatible with existing industry protocols like Agent2Agent (A2A), Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), and Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Keeping shoppers in the Google ecosystem 

Not only does UCP allow customers to buy without leaving Google it also ties in with other Google products, such as Google Pay and the shipping info consumers have saved to their Google Wallet. 

While it will soon also support PayPal, there’s a heavy focus on keeping the customer within Google’s digital ecosystem, rather than referring them to other sites and online services.

However, retailers aren’t entirely cut out of the equation. Google says retailers remain “the seller of record” and can customize the agentic commerce integration to their specific needs, “all while helping to capture sales and avoid abandoned carts”. 

Google said the wider roll out of UCP will happen in collaboration with retailers to “expand globally and add more capabilities – like discovering related products, applying loyalty rewards, and powering custom shopping experiences on Google.”

However, the ecommerce sector should still be wary. Google’s products have disrupted many industries, by creating business models that monetize the content produced – at  a cost – by other businesses, or keeping traffic within its own ecosystem instead of referring it to the websites it scrapes for information. While millions of businesses impacted by these practices see their revenues collapse, Google’s own advertising business generates enormous profits. 

For example, when news brands first went digital in the early 2000s they struggled to monetize online content, losing significant revenues as Google made billions from advertising against their content. As outlined in this explainer, the impact on local news has been especially profound. 

More recently, AI overviews have disrupted the game again by removing the need for consumers to click through to websites, but this time the impact is being felt far further than in the news media and some argue Google has gone from “helpful partner to publishing rival”. 

Connecting customers with their favorite brands 

In tandem with the UCP, Google also unveiled Business Agent, a new tool for retailers to help shoppers interact with them without leaving Google Search.

Business Agent debuted on January 12 with retailers like Lowe’s, Michael’s, Poshmark, and Reebok, among others. Eligible US-based retailers can choose to activate and customize this branded agent in Merchant Center.

Google said in the coming months, retailers will be able to “train the agent based on their data, access new customer insights, provide offers for related products and enable direct purchases – including agentic checkout – within the experience.”

Closing the loop with Google Ads

Completing the hat trick, Google announced Direct Offers, a new Google Ads pilot that allows advertisers to present exclusive offers for shoppers who are ready to buy directly in AI Mode.

It could be a 20 percent discount or free shipping. If a customer tells Search or Gemini about a specific product that they want to buy, Google will find results that meet the stated criteria. However, as everybody knows, customers are highly-motivated by price and Google now wants to leverage this.

With Direct Offers, “relevant retailers have an opportunity to also feature a special discount”. Google says this “helps you [the consumer] get better value and helps the retailer close the sale”, but the wider impact is likely to be far less positive. 

Training customers to buy only when they’re getting a discount distorts the wider market in several ways: 

• It tells the customer that full price is not great value for money.
• It devalues the product in the wider marketplace.
• It undermines the loyalty program model, whereby a customer trades their data for personalized offers and exclusive discounts.
• It erodes profit margins, meaning there’s less money in the bank for things such as salaries and marketing.
• It forces retailers to balance the books by either inflating all prices to begin, or passing that discount on in other ways, for example, more expensive shipping.

For Direct Offers, Google says it will use AI to determine when an offer is relevant to display: “We are initially focusing on discounts for the pilot and will expand to support the creation of offers with other attributes that help shoppers prioritize value over price alone, such as bundles and free shipping.”

“We’re already collaborating with brands like Petco, e.l.f. Cosmetics, Samsonite, Rugs USA, and Shopify merchants to shape Direct Offers into a faster, smarter way to help retailers connect with the next generation of shoppers,” Google added. 

What Google’s AI-powered shopping features mean for retailers 

Naturaly, Google's new agentic commerce tools mean discoverability will change dramatically. 

Speaking to CX Network in 2025, customer experience and AI strategy advisor Julia Ahfeldt said 2026 will mark a “seismic shift” in consumer adoption of generative and agentic AI.

“With over 800 million weekly ChatGPT users – of whom more than 50 percent are women with the fastest growth coming from developing markets – AI is rapidly moving from novelty to everyday utility,” she said. “The era of generative AI-driven discovery has begun, and few brands are truly ready for it.”

Google said: “The way people shop is changing, but our goal remains the same: to help retailers get discovered.”

To do this, it is enabling “dozens of new data attributes in Merchant Center” to support “easy discovery in the conversational commerce era,” on surfaces like AI Mode, Gemini, and Business Agent. Google said the new attributes “complement retailers’ existing data feeds and go beyond traditional keywords to include things like answers to common product questions, compatible accessories or substitutes”. 

Google will begin testing the features with a small group of retailers “soon” before expanding the test group in the coming months.

The wider impact on retail is likely to be significant. As outlined, Google disrupts every industry it touches. Even simple changes to existing products, such as Search, have repeatedly resulted in thousands of job losses. 

In predicting what the future could hold for retailers in a Google-powered trading environment, it’s worth looking to the marketplace model; specifically how Amazon has acquired so much power and influence it now shapes how retail works beyond its platforms. Amazon and other online marketplaces have driven customer demand for instant delivery and low-cost products at the cost of workers' rights while, ironically, pushing prices up across the board. This hasn’t just changed retail, it has also changed customer behavior and the balance of power. 

Google’s new suite of shopping tools has the power to re-write the rules of ecommerce and retail, but there are other trends influencing how successful it will be, among them whether or not consumers want even more of their online activity logged, analyzed, and resold by the same global tech giant.

It will take some time to see who the winners and losers are in the new ecommerce trading environment, but it is almost certain that not everybody will be a winner.

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