Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP): A Standard for Agent-Driven Commerce
Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is an open-source standard that unifies digital commerce so that AI agents can make direct, instant purchases across Google surfaces such as AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app. It reduces friction by using a shared set of commerce building blocks, with optional extensions, for the full shopping journey: discovery, checkout and post-purchase support. On the agent side, UCP gives an AI agent one common way to find products, complete a purchase and follow up after the sale on behalf of a person.
Within agentic AI, this places commerce inside the orchestration and control questions the field already asks. An agent that can buy needs defined purchase authority (a guardrail), its transactions need to be observable and traceable, and the product, price and order data it exchanges falls under data governance and data contracts. For organisations, agent-driven purchasing shifts part of the customer relationship from human-operated storefronts to software acting on a customer's behalf.
UCP: Universal Commerce Protocol
The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is an open-source standard designed to power the next generation of agentic commerce. By establishing a common language and functional primitives, UCP enables seamless commerce journeys between consumer surfaces, businesses and payment providers. It is built to work with existing retail infrastructure and is compatible with the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) to provide secure agentic payments support. It also gives businesses flexible ways to integrate via APIs, Agent2Agent (A2A) and the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
UCP is developed by Google in collaboration with industry leaders including Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart, and endorsed by over 20 global partners across the ecosystem such as Adyen, Mastercard, Stripe, Visa, Zalando and many more.