UCP: Google is writing the new grammar of E-commerce

As a Partner at Converteo and a specialist in AI, Agentic, & Data strategies, Guilhem Bodin supports Marketing and Digital departments in transforming their operations. This includes defining agentic strategies, optimizing customer journeys in the conversational era, and measuring the business impact of their AI investments.

Takeaways

• With its UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol), Google is establishing a new infrastructure where AI agents can make purchases in a standardized and secure way via APIs, without browsing websites.
• The role of the website is splitting in two: an experiential showcase for humans and a service provider for machines. A brand whose catalog is unreadable by an AI will become invisible.
• The automation of transactional purchasing turns it into a commodity, shifting value towards the human relationship: advice, community building, and brand experience are becoming essential again.

UCP: The new language of E-commerce

It was THE news of the week: Google shook up the NRF by unveiling UCP, the “nervous system” that will allow AI agents to shop on your behalf, securely and reliably. E-commerce has just gained an invisible infrastructure. How does it work?

1. A Common Language (Standardized Endpoints): Today, every merchant’s website is an island. For an AI agent to understand your inventory or shipping fees, it has to “guess” your interface. UCP imposes a standard: identical access points (APIs) for all merchants. The agent no longer guesses; it queries a certified data structure (Inventory, Price, Shipping).
2. The Secure “Handshake” (Identity & Auth): This is the critical point in Google’s documentation: UCP uses standards like OAuth and OpenID Connect. The goal? To allow the agent to prove it’s acting on your behalf, use your saved payment methods, and access your loyalty discounts, all without ever exposing your sensitive data in plain text.
3. Frictionless Checkout (Direct Transaction): UCP allows the purchase to be finalized directly within the AI’s interface. The agent sends a payment request to the merchant via the protocol, receives a confirmation, and the transaction is complete. The website is no longer a destination; it’s a service provider running in the background.

➜ UCP is a new standard for interoperability. Early adopters will gain a major competitive advantage by ensuring native visibility to the agents of tomorrow. Conversely, players who remain solely focused on the human-click paradigm will see their strategic importance gradually diminish: the dial of commercial performance is thus shifting from homepage optimization to the robustness of the API architecture.

The role of the website is on borrowed time

This new architecture leads to a profound redefinition of the website’s role. It is no longer a single destination, but a platform that must now fulfill a dual mission, serving two distinct audiences:

• for humans, it becomes an experiential showcase. Its success is measured by its ability to create strong brand preference and offer an experience rich enough to justify the effort of visiting it directly.
• for machines, it becomes a service provider. Its performance relies on robust and clear programming interfaces (APIs), which are the true entry point for automated transactions.

In other words, if a brand’s catalog is not natively readable by an AI, it will become invisible in this new transactional ecosystem.

The transaction becomes a commodity, the relationship becomes an art Again

This new situation logically favors the most direct channels. An optimized agent will naturally prefer the product at its source, with the best quality-to-price ratio. This behavior forces business models based on simple intermediation to profoundly redefine their added value, as the friction and opacity on which certain margins relied are set to decrease.

The automation of utilitarian purchasing is therefore not a threat, but a clarification. It frees the merchant from repetitive transactional tasks, allowing them to focus on their fundamental contribution: the human experience. Value thus shifts towards advice, community building, and the emotion that a brand universe can evoke.

Far from being an end in itself, this transition is an opportunity for specialization. The imperative for brands is to reinvent what it means to “do business”, at a time when the transaction is becoming a commodity. For those who can embrace this refocused role centered on relationships and expertise, the potential for value creation has never been stronger.