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.

New capabilities available in UCP

Since launch, we’ve worked with community contributors to add new optional capabilities to the protocol:

• UCP can help make online shopping more intuitive and convenient, thanks to a new Cart option that will let agents save or add multiple items to a shopping cart at once from a single store — just as a shopper typically would.
  
• UCP adopters will be able to access a new Catalog capability that lets agents retrieve select real-time product details from a retailer’s catalog where necessary — like variants, inventory and pricing.
  
• Building on existing standards, UCP will also support Identity Linking. 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.

As always, UCP adopters can customize the experience they provide by selecting which capabilities to support.

Scaling agentic commerce with Google

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.