Google set to launch a Universal Cart, takes agentic shopping to YouTube

Google is bringing its agentic commerce tool kit, also called the Universal Commerce Protocol, to more verticals.

At its I/O conference on Tuesday, Google said it is expanding UCP both overseas and across Google surfaces.The tech giant is bringing agentic shopping to YouTube with UCP-powered shopping experiences. Plus, it will soon expand UCP shopping to new markets overseas, including Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom.

UCP is an open source standard Google announced earlier this year that gives AI agents and systems a common language so they can work together across the shopping journey, from product research to checkout to tracking shipments.

“We have been thrilled to see how the entire industry has rallied behind UCP over the last few months…to help drive the agentic commerce protocol forward,” Ashish Gupta, VP/GM of merchant shopping at Google, told reporters on a press call.

As shoppers watch videos on YouTube, they’ll be able to buy products directly from the ad results appearing alongside them, Gupta added.

Add to cart: Google is also building a Universal Cart, an intelligent shopping cart and agentic hub for users shopping on Google. The cart is a single destination to save and track products across Google’s AI surfaces like Search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail.

The Universal Cart will be released this summer in the US, first on Google Search and the Gemini app, and then YouTube and Gmail.

The thinking behind the cart is that shopping rarely happens in a single sitting, Suresh Ganapathy, senior director of product at Google, told reporters on the press call.

“You shop across multiple sessions, sometimes multiple days, sometimes on your phone or your laptop, and a lot of the time you have to go back to where you started,” Ganapathy said. “You may miss some of the products that you liked, you didn’t save them properly, you didn’t write them up in a spreadsheet, and so that’s what we’re trying to solve with the Universal Cart.”

Whether users are browsing Google search, chatting with Gemini, watching YouTube videos, or reading a retailer’s email, they can add products directly to the so-called “universal cart.” From there it does the work: hunting for deals, tracking prices, alerting users when something drops in price or comes back in stock.