Google wants to do your shopping for you. At I/O 2026 in May, Google announced a feature that’s hard not to like and not to worry about.
VP of Ads and Commerce Vidhya Srinivasan called it the “foundation of agentic commerce.” The idea is that you drop items into Google’s Universal Cart as you surf the web.
The cart can track deals, price drops, price history, and restocks, while Google’s AP2 protocol lays the groundwork for AI agents to complete purchases later under user-approved limits.
Convenient, yes, but it puts Google between you and many retailers on the web.
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One cart to rule them all
Online shopping gets complicated fast. You open a dozen tabs to compare the same product, and as soon as checkout asks you to create an account, you abandon the cart.
Universal Cart is betting you’ll buy more if Google handles the hard part of shopping.
The cart follows you across Search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail, though the initial rollout starts with Search and the Gemini app, with YouTube and Gmail to follow.
Say you’re watching a YouTube review of a camera. You can tap to add it to your cart, then ask Gemini to find a compatible memory card.
Google showed off the proactive side during its I/O keynote with a custom PC build. A user dropped an Intel motherboard into the cart next to an AMD Ryzen processor.
Gemini flagged the incompatibility and suggested a board with the correct AM5 socket. For a novice shopper, that’s really useful.
The cart is built on Google Wallet. It already knows your saved payment methods and merchant perks. You can cash in on discounts and points without having to remember everything.
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UCP meets AP2
For an AI to shop on your behalf, it first has to be able to talk to stores. Google’s fix is a shared rulebook called the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP).
With it, Google can build your cart on its own pages and then hand the finished cart over to the store if they opt in.
But carts are only half the job. An agent also needs a safe way to pay because you never hand a credit card to a chatbot.
To handle that, your permission is turned into signed digital contracts that can’t be tampered with via the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2).
That preauthorization lets the agent assemble the cart and finish the purchase hours or days later, and since payments run through tokenized Google Pay, financial details never sit on the platform.
The privacy concern is valid, but so is the convenience
A hard deal to refuse
Privacy advocates will sound the alarm about handing this much purchasing power to one company, and they should. But I suspect those warnings will mostly go unheard.
People are tired of account creation and filling out forms on a phone. Universal Cart takes most of that away.
I expect that shoppers will trade away decentralized retail for a cart that does the boring work, and won’t think twice.
But what about the retailers? If Gemini handles discovery, comparison, and checkout, merchants may lose site visits and merchandising opportunities.
Brands spend millions optimizing their sites for cross-sells and upsells. Walk into a running-shoe site for sneakers, and you might leave with athletic socks too. In an agentic setup, that kind of accidental discovery may not happen.
You’d think retailers would boycott this, but the big names are lining up. Nike, Sephora, Target, Ulta Beauty, Walmart, Wayfair, and Shopify brands like Fenty and Steve Madden are all early adopters.
They know what they’re risking, but they cannot ignore the competitive pressure. If a rival lets Google’s agents buy their products with two taps, and you don’t, you lose.
Google is becoming the layer between you and the internet
Call it a feature if you want, but Google is slowly rewiring how the internet runs. The same thing is happening across software engineering, your Android phone, your inbox, your calendar, with agents handling more while you sit back.
Convenience is the easiest thing in the world to say yes to. But when the same company maps the products, runs the agent, and processes the payment, the future is either a utopia or a dystopia, and we won’t know which until we’re living in it.
