Google has announced a new open-source standard for agentic commerce called the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP).
Developed in collaboration with a number of commerce companies, including Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart, UCP establishes a common language and primitives for the commerce journey between consumer surfaces, businesses, and payment providers.
“As consumers embrace conversational experiences, they expect seamless transitions from brainstorming and research to final purchase. That means it’s critical to support real-time inventory checks, dynamic pricing, and instant transactions, all within the user’s current conversational context,” Google wrote in a blog post.
According to Google, current infrastructure doesn’t support agentic commerce well, and businesses are required to build new connections for every surface they want to connect. It built UCP to address this bottleneck by providing a single abstraction layer between services.
The four key elements of UCP are:
- A single integration point for all consumer surfaces
- Shared language to standardize discovery, capability schema, and transport bindings
- Extensible architecture that can scale as new agentic experiences emerge
- A security-first approach that provides tokenized payments and verifiable credentials so that agents and businesses can securely communicate.
“UCP is built to power agentic experiences across the commerce ecosystem. It creates a clear language for consumer surfaces (such as AI Mode on Search, Gemini, and others) to connect to business backends (for product discovery, cart checkout etc) in a standardized and secure way,” the company wrote.
More information about UCP can be found here.
