Google has introduced Universal Cart to provide help for online shoppers.

“We’re building the foundation for agentic commerce, with updates including a new intelligent cart that brings superpowers to your shopping,” said Google vice president Vidhya Srinivasan in a blog post.

People shop across Google more than a billion times a day, powered by AI and the Shopping Graph, a catalogue of more than 60 billion product listings.

Universal Cart is an intelligent shopping cart and a hub for shopping on Google. It works across merchants and across services, so users can add things to the cart while they are browsing Search, chatting with Gemini, watching YouTube or even reading Gmail.

The moment someone adds a product to the cart, it gets to work in the background finding deals and price drops, giving insights on price history and alerting the user when an item is back in stock. It all runs on Gemini models, so the cart gets smarter as the models improve.

Universal Cart also uses intelligent reasoning to anticipate needs and help solve problems before they arise. Since the cart was built on Google Wallet, it understands payment method perks, loyalty information and merchant offers, so it can help users choose. This lets them quickly find opportunities for hidden savings or points without having to remember them.

When the suer is ready to buy, Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP, blog.google/products/ads-commerce/agentic-commerce-ai-tools-protocol-retailers-platforms/) smooths checkout from the cart. Users can check out with Google Pay in a few taps with many favourite brands, or transfer items to the merchant’s site to complete the purchase. Shoppers will be able to try these select checkout features soon across merchants such as Nike, Sephora, Target, Ulta Beauty, Walmart, Wayfair and Shopify merchants such as Fenty and Steve Madden.

Universal Cart is rolling out across Search and the Gemini app in the USA this summer, with YouTube and Gmail to follow.

“Since we co-developed the Universal Commerce Protocol with retail leaders earlier this year, the industry has rallied around this common language in an incredible way,” said Srinivasan. “Building on that momentum, we’re expanding our UCP-powered checkout experience on Google to Canada and Australia in the coming months and later to the UK. UCP is also coming to YouTube in the USA, and to even more verticals, starting soon with hotel booking and local food delivery.”

Google created the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2, cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/announcing-agents-to-payments-ap2-protocol) to help agents make secure payments on users’ behalf, with boundaries and accountability. AP2 lets users set strict guardrails for agentic payment transactions.

“Just tell your agent the specific brands and products you want and how much it can spend, and the agent only makes the purchase when your criteria are met,” said Srinivasan.

Under the hood, AP2 creates a transparent, verifiable link between the shopper, merchant and payment processor and uses privacy preserving technology to keep data safe. Tamper-proof digital mandates ensure the agent is always acting on the shopper’s behalf, giving a permanent digital paper trail. So, if the shopper ever needs to make a return, they and the merchant are looking at the same record. Google will begin bringing AP2 to Google products in the coming months, starting with Gemini Spark.

“While the full potential of agentic commerce is still unfolding, we’ve been laying the building blocks for this future for years,” said Srinivasan (blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/shopping/google-shopping-cart/). “Now with Universal Cart, we’re excited to put that foundation to work for shoppers.”