Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)

Agentic Shopping, AEO & Paid Media Strategy for AI

While Agentic AI is still relatively early in adoption, there are major movements in protocols at this stage which will determine the winning approach to agentic shopping opportunities for both Paid and Organic Search Optimisation.

As ChatGPT is stumbling with shopping adoption, the leading contender - given their legacy reach and dominant model performance in benchmarking - is indisputably Google's Gemini.

In January, Google took a decisive step to dominate agentic commerce by launching their push for a new standard: the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP).

Consumer Behaviour Considerations for Agentic Shopping

It is worth stepping back from the technology side for a moment to consider consumer behaviour.

A major reason cited by The Information for ChatGPT's backward step from native app shopping was their own data suggesting that despite offering single click checkout, ChatGPT users preferred not to convert in-app and typically would abandon. Presumably to complete checkout directly on storefronts by their surfaced retailer.

Per the Information's reporting: "Providing live prices and other data on millions of products from countless merchants is an enormous undertaking. If ChatGPT provides data that’s slightly inaccurate or out of date, it could cause a transaction to fail. Then there’s the additional responsibility of dealing with refunds, cancellations, and fraud prevention, all while complying with tax and consumer protection laws."

I can almost hear the sound of retailers smiling wryly as a disruptor tech realises they don't have all the solutions to age old challenges after all!

However, the interesting aspect of UCP is that Google has taken a different approach which clearly has been steered by its experience as an AdTech platform for decades.

Lets dig into the practicalities.

Google's Agentic Shopping Play: Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)

Launching with comprehensive guidance documentation - though all implementation is strictly limited to retailers in the US currently - UCP operates as an extension of your Google Shopping activity, with native integration to Merchant Centre.

Indeed, such is Google's vertical strategic advantage, it has also launched with built in support for its own payment system: Google Pay.

This integration allows developers to build a 'Native Checkout' for agentic shopping across Web, iOS and Android leaning on Google stack with not other technical requirements beyond managing their Merchant Centre

This approach thereby entirely circumvents the use of - to take one example - onerous Content Management Systems (CMS's) such as Shopify that would typically be expected to build support to enable hooking up inventory to agentic systems - oh, and profit from checkout fee based contracts...

So in essence, if you have a Merchant centre feed already configured - and literally every retailer or brand in existence in the western world would! - then you can plug and play into the agentic shopping world with UCP once it becomes available in your market.

As stock resource management is typically managed in front of merchant feeds, stock controls built for the pre-agentic world, can remain in place.

It's an impressively light-touch and elegant way for Google to approach unlocking the - potentially - next new era of online marketplace for brands globally.