Transcription
There's a 23-second clip from Google's recent developer conference that most people glossed over, but it just rewrote the rules for every online store on the planet. A Google engineer typed a question into Gemini. The AI picked a product and money moved without the shopper ever visiting a website, a checkout page, or a store. It took 23 seconds from question to purchase and not a single click was made on anyone's homepage.
That clip was Google quietly announcing that the checkout no longer belongs to you. It belongs to them now and they've already signed up Nike, Walmart, Sephora, and Wayfair to prove it. I've been watching this play out inside my own store, and what I'm seeing should worry every single seller who is not already paying attention. So, let me tell you exactly what Google announced because the headlines made it sound like a small feature, and it is anything but.
On May 19th at their big developer conference, Google launched something called Universal Cart. It is one shopping cart that lives across everything Google owns. You can drop a product into it while you're searching, while you're chatting with Gemini, while you're watching YouTube, even while you're reading your email. And the moment something lands in that cart, the cart goes to work on its own. It hunts for a lower price. It tracks the price history. It pings the shopper when an out-of-stock item comes back in stock. It can even look at the parts in the cart and tell the buyer when two of them will not work together.
And here's why that matters to you and me. For my entire career, the checkout has been the one piece that I control. People found my handkerchiefs through search or an ad. They came to my store and they bought on my own turf. Well, Google just took that final step off of my website and pulled it into their own backyard. And they're not testing this with nobody's. The brands already signed up include Nike, Walmart, Sephora, Wayfair, and Shopify sellers like Fenty and Steve Madden. The biggest names in retail looked at this and jumped in. And that alone should tell you something is real here.
Now, Universal Cart is only half of it. Google also rolled out a virtual try-on tool inside of search where a shopper uploads a photo of themselves and sees how your clothing looks on their own body before they ever land on your site. It is the same trend because the research, the comparison shopping, and the buying are all migrating onto Google's turf and away from yours.
Now, underneath that cart is a piece of plumbing Google calls the Universal Commerce Protocol, or UCP for short. Now, do not let this name scare you off because the idea is very simple. It is a common language that lets any AI shopping agent read your store and complete a sale. And Google co-built it with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart. And then got Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe, and Home Depot to back it up.
And here's why that matters to you. UCP is API-based, which is a fancy way of saying Google can look up your actual products, your real prices, and your live inventory the instant a shopper asks straight from your store. Now, compare that to the old way where Google relied on a crawled copy of your site that it grabbed days or even weeks ago. a snapshot that is usually out of date the moment it is taken. And under that old system, if you changed a price or sold out of a size, the search result might show the wrong number for days or even weeks and the customer would get wrong information. But with UCP, the agent sees what is true right now in real time. And that is exactly why this makes your products more likely to get mentioned in search if you have it implemented. When the AI knows your data is live and accurate, it trusts you and it surfaces the brands it trusts. So speaking this UCP language is the difference between being the product the agent confidently recommends versus the one that does not show up at all.
But this announcement is just the tip of the iceberg. The reason Google is moving this fast right now is the part most sellers are missing and it's already showing up in my own sales data. So here's what's happening right now. Now looking at my store, the number of sales coming to me through AI-driven traffic, has been growing exponentially over the last year. I sell handkerchiefs, linens, and embroidered products, which is about as boring and old school as it gets. If it is hitting a category like mine, it is definitely hitting yours. And Wall Street is throwing enormous numbers at this shift. Morgan Stanley estimates that AI-driven shopping agents could account for up to $385 billion in US commerce spending by 2030. Shoppers were already using AI to research and compare. The only missing piece was a clean way to finish that purchase without leaving the chat or the video, and that is the exact gap Google just filled.
Now, from Google's side, this is a very smart, aggressive land grab, and I get why they made it. The problem is what it does to the person on the other end of the transaction, which is you. And most sellers have no idea how much power they're about to hand over. So, let me show you the part that actually hits your bottom line. There are two real shifts here. and I want to walk through each one the way I would explain it to a friend at my mastermind table.
The first one is that the visit to your website is no longer guaranteed. For 20 years, the game was simple. Get the click, get them to your site, and let your homepage, your product page, and your reviews do the selling. Universal Cart can skip every bit of that. The customer adds your product from a search result or a video, and then buys without ever seeing your store, which means the page you spent months optimizing might not ever load.
Now, I've been thinking a lot about what this will do to brands like mine. Tushy, the bidet company, is the perfect example of a store that lives or dies on its homepage. When they started, almost nobody was searching for a bidet. So, their whole job was convincing a skeptical first-time buyer right there on their own website with the funny, disarming copy and the story that made an awkward product feel normal. And that on-site experience is the entire reason people bought. They grew from $8 million in revenue to 40 million in about a year. And one better landing page alone more than doubled their conversion rate from 2.5% to 5.5%. Now before agentic shopping, that page doing the selling was the entire game. In a universal cart world, the customer may buy without ever seeing it. So that persuasion has to happen before the cart instead of on it.
Now, by the way, if you're interested in learning how to start your own profitable online store, make sure you sign up for my free 6-day e-commerce mini-course below. It's 100% free and I guarantee you'll learn a ton.
The second shift is that the buying decision gets made by an algorithm, not a shopper. When that cart compares your product against every competitor Google can see, it can only pick you if they can actually find and read your data. And here's where a lot of great sellers are about to get a nasty surprise. So, a friend of mine sells standing desks. His is the top-rated standing desk on all of Amazon. Thousands of reviews, the kind of product that should win every recommendation. But when you ask an AI which standing desk to buy, he's nowhere, completely invisible. And it comes down to two things he actually didn't know about.
The first is that Amazon has been quietly blocking AI crawlers from reading its site, adding bot after bot to its block list to keep companies like OpenAI and Google from scraping its product data. So all those reviews and all that ranking that made him number one on Amazon do the AI absolutely no good because the AI cannot see inside of Amazon at all. And the second thing is that his own website was never set up for an AI to read. So even off Amazon, the agents had nothing clean to pull. He did everything right by the old rules and still ended up invisible under the new ones.
And then there's the part Google is hoping you do not notice. And to be fair, they did include one piece of good news. With Universal Cart, the brand stays the merchant of record, which means you keep the customer relationship and the transaction on paper. And in practical terms, you still get the customer's email so you can follow up when the repeat purchase and your post-purchase flows still fire off that order. So, the relationship is not gone.
But some of what you count on for revenue quietly stops working. The abandoned cart sequence is a great example because if the customer checks out inside of Google and never lands on your site, there's no cart on your store to abandon. So that flow has nothing to trigger on. And the bigger loss is the moment of the sale itself. When checkout happens inside of Google instead of on your website, the cross-sells and the upsells that live on that page stop working. There's no "frequently bought together," no order bump, no "add this for 10% off" right as the customer has their wallet out. And for a lot of stores, that on-page upsell is a real chunk of their average order value.
And here's the brutally honest version. Merchant of record on paper means nothing when Google controls discovery, comparison, and the cart all at once. You are not running a store anymore. You are renting space inside of Google's store. And we watched this exact movie play out with Amazon where the terms are always great right up until the day they are not. So that is the threat laid out plainly.
Now, here's what you can actually do about it.
So, step one, get your data and your reviews in shape because that is what the agents read. This is the unsexy, boring work that is about to matter more than your homepage design. Your titles, prices, specs, and stock counts have to be clean, complete, and speak the language of your customer avatar. Vague descriptions and pretty marketing copy are invisible to an agent and will not pick you up unless your product matches the query.
Google just announced a new concrete tool for these descriptions inside Merchant Center. They rolled out something called conversational attributes, which are new fields built specifically so the AI can answer the longer, more nuanced questions that shoppers ask. You can add a direct question and answer, a popularity rank, related products, all of it straight into your feed. Now, these new fields are completely optional, which is exactly why most sellers will ignore it. And that is your opportunity. The store owner who fills in these is literally writing the answers the AI gives a shopper about their product. So, don't let the AI just guess.
Then there are your reviews. The agents lean hard on customer reviews as a live trust signal because it is fresh proof from real buyers that keeps updating. A store with rich, recent, and genuine reviews gets mentioned. And a store with three reviews from 2022 gets skipped. That review request email you keep meaning to automate just became a ranking factor. So, get it set up this week.
And while you're cleaning up the data side, check one more thing. The universal commerce protocol we talked about earlier is the pipe that lets an agent read your store and actually finish a sale. If you're on Shopify, you're in good shape because Google named Shopify directly in the launch. And this plumbing is built right into the platform. But if you're on anything else, go ask your platform whether they support UCP because an agent that cannot complete a checkout on your store will quietly go buy from a competitor whose checkout it can complete.
Step two, get your brand mentioned on the sites these AI systems already trust. This is the one almost nobody is acting on yet, and it's the biggest opportunity in this whole video. And right at the top of that list is Reddit. Reddit is now the single most cited source across every major AI engine, responsible for about 40% of all citations these systems make. Google made that official on May 7th when it started pulling Reddit threads straight into the search results as community perspectives. So, when a shopper asks an AI for the best product in your category, the answer is often built from a Reddit thread, a YouTube review, or a best-of roundup. If your brand genuinely shows up in those conversations, you get pulled into the recommendation. But if it does not, you stay invisible no matter how good your product is.
Now, let me be clear about how you actually do this because there's a wrong way that will get you burned. You do not spam Reddit with fake posts hyping your own brand because that's going to get you banned. Instead, you got to earn it. You show up in the communities where your customers already hang out. You answer real questions like a human. You get real customers talking to you, and you work your way into honest roundups and reviews. AI is watching for your name to come up naturally across a lot of trusted places. And when it does, it will start treating you as the answer.
Step three, build name demand outside of the algorithm. Take a look at Graza, the squeeze bottle olive oil brand. They reportedly crossed into the tens of millions in revenue within a couple years. And they did it through founder PR, podcast appearances, chef partnerships, and social media. When they were small, that name demand was their entire moat, and it still is.
Now, step two is about earning your way into the trusted sources the AI reads. This step is the layer above that. Get on podcasts in your category. Pitch the press, sponsor newsletters and creators your customer already follows, and partner with the people who carry weight with your buyer. When the customer asks for your brand, specifically, AI has to deliver your products, and it cannot quietly swap in the cheapest alternative. And here's a simple test to see where you stand right now. Go ask Gemini or ChatGPT to recommend a product in your category, and watch whether your name comes up. And if it doesn't, that's your new homework.
So, here's where this leaves us. This shift is not reversing, so don't fight it. I've lived through every one of these shifts for 19 years, and the pattern never changes. The people who move first while everyone else is still in denial are the ones who will succeed. And if you want to go deeper on that Reddit piece, I made a whole video on how sellers are using Reddit to get in front of buyers. And it pairs perfectly with everything we just covered because discovery and checkout are now two halves of the same machine. Watch that here.