Google is standing up infrastructure that lets shoppers store from numerous retailers with out leaving its properties, whether or not they’re watching movies on YouTube, shopping on Search, or querying the Gemini app. The native checkout function strengthens Google’s commerce place towards Amazon by conserving shoppers on its platforms quite than clicking out to different websites.
In conjunction with that change, Google can be introducing new advert codecs inside its AI Mode search interface and rolling out an AI agent designed to function as an orchestration layer throughout Google’s numerous advertising capabilities and platforms.
The bulletins have been made Wednesday on the tech firm’s annual advertising summit, Google Marketing Live, in Mountain View, California, and observe the announcement of a historic overhaul of the Google search bar.
“2026 is the year I see us fully transitioning from AI’s potential into its everyday reality,” mentioned Dan Taylor, the corporate’s vice chairman of worldwide advertisements, on a name with press. With Gemini underpinning the entire firm’s flagship instruments and new commerce capabilities enabled by the current institution of the technical customary Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), Taylor added, “we’re moving from marketing automation to marketing intelligence.”
Native checkout fortifies Google’s walled backyard
On the commerce entrance, Google’s new native checkout function, Universal Cart, acts as a single procuring cart that works throughout retailers and Google surfaces. A client can add make-up from Sephora to their cart from inside the Gemini app, then add house cleansing merchandise from Target by means of Google Search, and a pair of footwear from Nike by way of a YouTube video—and take a look at collectively.
The device is enabled by UCP, enabling Google’s programs to speak straight with the retailers’ programs on the backend. Retailer launch companions embody Sephora, Target, Nike, Ulta Beauty, Walmart, Wayfair, and Shopify, and these retailers will nonetheless legally personal the transactions accomplished by way of Universal Cart.
The push heightens the partitions round Google’s backyard, incentivizing shoppers to browse and store fully inside Google’s ecosystem by eliminating the necessity to click on out to a service provider’s web site (although that possibility stays accessible). In this fashion, the event acts as a direct problem to Amazon.
Even so, the corporate’s Ashish Gupta, vice chairman and common supervisor of service provider procuring, insisted Google will not be changing into a market unto itself. “We see ourselves as a matchmaker, connecting shoppers directly with businesses,” he mentioned. “We are not a retailer, we are not a marketplace, and that approach continues to guide us in this agentic era as well.”