Google’s new Universal Cart wants to follow your entire shopping journey across the internet
Quick Answer
Google's Universal Cart centralizes online shopping, allowing users to manage purchases across platforms while AI assists in decision-making.
Quick Take
The Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) enables secure automated payments, enhancing the shopping experience and giving Google greater control over consumer transactions.
Key Points
- Universal Cart allows users to add products from Google services like Search and YouTube.
- AI features help identify compatibility issues when shopping for custom PC parts.
- AP2 enables AI agents to make secure payments on users' behalf with spending limits.
- Universal Cart is rolling out in the U.S. and will expand to Canada and Australia.
- Google's UCP will include more categories, like hotels and food delivery services.
📖 Reader Mode
~3 min readAt Google I/O on Tuesday, Google introduced Universal Cart, its agentic hub for managing shopping in one place. The tech giant also announced updates to its Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) and teased that it would bring the technology to Google products in the coming months, enabling users to authorize agents to make payments on their behalf.
The announcements signal Google’s push to turn AI assistants from passive recommendation tools into active participants in online commerce. By launching a centralized shopping system and building infrastructure that lets software agents complete purchases autonomously, the company is positioning itself to control more of the entire shopping journey, and potentially the relationship between consumers and the merchants competing for their attention.
With Universal Cart, users can add products they’re considering from anywhere on Google — while browsing Search, chatting with Gemini, watching YouTube, or reading Gmail. Once items are added, Universal Cart tracks deals, monitors price drops, surfaces price history insights, and alerts users when items are back in stock.
The feature is built around something Google knows well, which is that most people shop across multiple devices, multiple retailers, and over the course of many days.
The cart also uses AI to help shoppers make better decisions. For example, if you’re building your first custom PC, you can add parts from multiple merchants into a single cart, and Google may flag compatibility issues, such as a processor that doesn’t work with the motherboard you selected — and suggest an alternative.
For frequent travelers or rewards maximizers, the feature can also surface hidden savings and help stretch your points further because it’s built on Google Wallet.
Thanks to Google’s open-standard Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), users can check out directly through Google with participating merchants, or transfer their items to the merchant site and complete the purchase there.
Universal Cart is rolling out in the U.S. today and coming to the Gemini app this summer, with YouTube and Gmail to follow, Google says.
Google also announced that UCP is expanding to more categories, like hotels and local food delivery services. UCP-powered experiences will also expand beyond the U.S. to Canada and Australia in the coming months, and later to the U.K.
The more consequential announcement for the commerce industry may be AP2, Google’s protocol designed to let AI agents securely make payments on users’ behalf within defined limits. At I/O, Google detailed the guardrails users can set, including specifying the brands and products they want, and a spending limit. When those conditions are met, the agent makes the purchase automatically.
Google says it’s bringing AP2 to its own products in the coming months. That integration would give Google direct visibility into what consumers discover, consider, and ultimately buy, and it’s a degree of commercial influence that retailers and payment processors will be watching closely.
Under the hood, AP2 creates a transparent, verifiable link between the user, the merchant, and the payment processor, with encryption protecting user data throughout. The protocol also includes tamper-proof digital records that ensure the agent is always acting on the user’s behalf, and a permanent audit trail that both buyers and sellers can reference for returns or disputes.
Catch up on the rest of Google IO 2026’s big news
Google Search as you know it is over
Google updates Gemini app to take on ChatGPT and Claude
Google introduces Gemini Spark, a 24/7 agent assistant with Gmail integration
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Aisha is a consumer news reporter at TechCrunch. Prior to joining the publication in 2021, she was a telecom reporter at MobileSyrup. Aisha holds an honours bachelor’s degree from University of Toronto and a master’s degree in journalism from Western University.
You can contact or verify outreach from Aisha by emailing aisha@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at aisha_malik.01 on Signal.
— Originally published at techcrunch.com
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