Google’s latest commerce moves deepen the battle over agentic shopping

Universal Cart is just one part of Google’s beefed up Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). UCP is the groundwork that enables agentic shopping within Google’s ecosystem that launched in January. Other bells and whistles include buy-now and pay-later features and loyalty pricing.

“We can now see that this isn’t just about agentic commerce, but is a new commerce experience that will be showing up on a lot of Google’s most used surfaces (YouTube, Search, Ads, and Gemini),” said a commerce exec who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Advertiser concerns and Google’s ‘matchmaker’ role

The question for advertisers, as far as Alicia Gehring, vp of media strategy, WHITE64, is concerned, is challenger brands’ reliance on Google to continue to attract interested shoppers at a cost that makes sense for advertisers.

Google’s roadmap is likely “the beginning of a broader restructuring of commerce around AI agents and assistant-driven decisioning,” said Molly Schonthal, managing director of agentic commerce at VML in an emailed statement to Digiday. 

Historically, Google has invested in discovery and search intent as the tech behemoth sits on a treasure trove of shopper data. Now, Google is looking to be “matchmaker” between shoppers and brands, said Ashish Gupta, vp and general manager of merchant shopping at Google.

“We are not a retailer, we are not a marketplace, and that approach continues to guide us in this agentic era as well,” Gupta said at a virtual roundtable ahead of Google Marketing Live last week. 

Rivals’ AI commerce moves

Pressure, however, has been mounting from elsewhere in the commerce space as it becomes more competitive.

“I think they’re seeing the massive volume of transactions and shopping in commerce come out TikTok Shop, and coming out of Meta, and they’re saying, ‘We want a piece of that’,” said Phil Case, president and chief client officer at Max Connect Digital, a performance driven digital agency, referring to Google’s latest UCP updates.

Earlier this month, Amazon integrated its LLM-powered AI assistant, Alexa+, into its shopping experience and Amazon ecosystem. At the same time, Amazon’s bespoke AI shopping assistant Rufus was replaced by Alexa for Shopping. Users can ask questions in the main search bar, create personalized shopping guides and automate deal finding.

There was also OpenAI’s now defunct Instant Checkout feature in ChatGPT. Instant Checkout worked across the web, allowing shoppers to pay merchants directly from ChatGPT’s app and leaving fulfillment to retailers. 

TikTok Shop too has been gaining steam in the social stratosphere, driving $4.9 billion in U.S. sales, according to e-commerce data provider Charm.io and reported by The Wall Street Journal. In March Meta is reportedly testing a shopping research feature in its AI chatbot in hopes to rival Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, per Bloomberg.

The battle for consumer trust

“The broader implication is that platforms increasingly want to become the ‘digital steward’ of consumer decision-making, not just the destination where transactions occur,” said Schonthal. 

Google stands a better chance than OpenAI — at least after its Instant Checkout flub, said the anonymous exec. The agentic commerce battle is less about OpenAI versus Google and more about what the exec calls “horizontal agents,” like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic that operate within their own ecosystems, and “vertical agents,” like Amazon and Walmart that operate within a specific commerce domain.

As much as these platforms want to become the sole digital steward of consumer-destination, as Schonthal puts it, there’s an uphill battle on the consumer trust front. According to research from Quad and The Harris Poll, 54% of Americans “find allowing AI access to their shopping history unappealing.” Meanwhile, 73% reportedly feel “uneasy about how AI might use personal shopping data,” per the research. 

“What I saw more than anything else was [Google] getting us comfortable with the conversation with essentially a computer — to get to answers faster,” said Elizabeth Marsten, vp of commerce media at Tinuiti.