Expanding the Universal Commerce Protocol’s impact
Since we co-developed the Universal Commerce Protocol with retail leaders earlier this year, the industry has rallied around this common language in an incredible way. Recently, we welcomed several new tech partners to help steer this open standard.
Building on that momentum, we’re expanding our UCP-powered checkout experience on Google to Canada and Australia in the coming months and later to the U.K. UCP is also coming to YouTube in the U.S., and to even more verticals, starting soon with hotel booking and local food delivery.
Scaling secure agentic purchases
We created the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) to help agents make secure payments on your behalf, with boundaries and accountability to give you peace of mind. AP2 lets you set strict guardrails for agentic payment transactions. Just tell your agent the specific brands and products you want and how much it can spend, and the agent only makes the purchase when your criteria are met.
Under the hood, AP2 creates a transparent, verifiable link between you, the merchant and the payment processor and uses privacy preserving technology to keep your data safe. Tamper-proof digital mandates ensure the agent is always acting on your behalf, giving you a permanent digital paper trail. So, if you ever need to make a return, you and the merchant are looking at the same record. We’ll begin bringing AP2 to Google products in the coming months, starting with Gemini Spark.
While the full potential of agentic commerce is still unfolding, we’ve been laying the building blocks for this future for years. Now with Universal Cart, we’re excited to put that foundation to work for shoppers. Check out more ways Search is using the power of agents to help you ask even more of your questions.
