UCP is not a feature, not a plugin, and not a Google-only experiment.It is a new technical standard that could change how people buy products online, especially when AI assistants become the main way people search and decide.
Think of UCP less like Google Shopping and more like HTTP for shopping. You don’t see HTTP when you browse the web but nothing works without it. UCP aims to play the same role for AI-driven commerce.
Let’s start with what actually changes for users.
No tabs.
No forms.
No classic “checkout page”.
That experience is powered by UCP.
It would be easy to ignore this if it were “just Google testing something”.
But UCP was co-developed with major players:
And supported by payment networks like:
That matters, because it signals something important:
The entire industry agrees that AI agents need a shared way to talk to e-shops.
Without that, AI commerce simply does not scale.
Let’s strip away all technical language and look at the problem in simple terms.
Imagine a future with multiple AI assistants that can shop for users:
Without a standard, every one of these agents would need a custom integration with every e-shop. And every e-shop would need to support all of them separately. That quickly becomes impossible to maintain.
UCP solves this by creating one shared language. An e-shop describes what it can do in a standardized way. Any AI agent that understands UCP can read that description and interact with the shop correctly.
In practice, this means: integrate once, become available everywhere.
At its core, Universal Commerce Protocol is a rulebook. It defines how an e-shop can say things like:
The e-shop publishes this information in a machine-readable way. The AI reads it, checks what is compatible, and decides whether it can safely complete a purchase.
Instead of guessing, scraping websites, or relying on fragile workarounds, everything is explicit and predictable.
At this point, many marketers outside the US will think: “Interesting, but not relevant for us yet.” You might be one of them. That reaction is understandable, but risky.
Even if UCP itself arrives in your market (in 2027 or… never) the logic behind it is already shaping how AI systems evaluate businesses.
AI agents increasingly decide:
And they make those decisions based on structured data, not on beautifully designed landing pages.
Another uncomfortable truth: AI agents do not read websites the way humans do.
They do not scroll.
They do not admire layouts.
They consume structured data.
For Google-based AI commerce, that data lives primarily in Merchant Center:
This means that, for AI-driven shopping, Merchant Center can become more important than the website itself. Your website still matters for branding, trust, and fallback scenarios. But the decision logic increasingly happens elsewhere.
UCP is explicitly designed so that the merchant remains the Merchant of Record. You are not selling through a marketplace in the traditional sense.
You:
Google or any other AI agent is infrastructure, not an intermediary that takes over the relationship.
The honest answer is: we don’t know yet.
UCP is live. It has real implementations, real code, and real partners. But history shows that being live does not guarantee success.
What is certain is the direction. AI will increasingly mediate decisions between users and businesses. One of the first examples we’ve introduced was ChatGPT Shopping. Structured data, trust, and operational reliability will matter more than ever.
Even if UCP itself fails, the preparation for it is not wasted.
