214: How Google Just Took Control of AI Commerce (UCP + Apple Deal Explained)

Google just made two massive moves in 48 hours, and together, they could reshape how AI interacts with commerce forever.

First: the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard that lets AI agents shop on your behalf. Discovery, checkout, payments, post-purchase, the whole journey, with one common language. Backed by Shopify, Walmart, Target, Visa, Mastercard, and 20+ others.

Second: a multi-year deal with Apple. Gemini will power the next generation of Apple Intelligence, including Siri. That's Google's AI running on 2 billion Apple devices.

In this episode, I break down what UCP actually is, how it works, why the Apple deal matters, and what this means for merchants, developers, and anyone building for the agentic web.

CHAPTERS

• 00:00 – The Anthony Joshua smile meme (and what it has to do with Google) 
• 02:59 – The landscape: AI agents, fragmentation, and the assistant wars 
• 06:36 – What is UCP? Universal Commerce Protocol explained 
• 11:04 – Who's backing UCP and what it enables today 
• 14:21 – The Apple-Gemini deal: what it means 
• 17:55 – Why Apple chose Google (and what happens to OpenAI) 
• 21:00 – Connecting the dots: Google's full strategy 
• 24:00 – What this means for merchants and developers 
• 26:30 – The bigger picture: who controls the agentic web? 
• 29:07 – Closing thoughts

LINKS

• UCP Documentation: https://ucp.dev
• UCP GitHub: https://github.com/Universal-Commerce-Protocol/ucp
• Google's UCP Announcement: https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/agentic-commerce-ai-tools-protocol-retailers-platforms/
• Google-Apple Joint Statement: https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/company-announcements/joint-statement-google-apple/
• Shopify's UCP Deep-Dive: https://shopify.engineering/UCP

KEYWORDS/TAGS

Google, UCP, Universal Commerce Protocol, AI agents, agentic commerce, e-commerce, Apple Intelligence, Gemini, Siri, AI shopping, MCP, Shopify, OpenAI, retail technology

No Hacks is a podcast about web performance, technical SEO, and the agentic web. Hosted by Slobodan "Sani" Manic.

Transcript

Google Out for Blood
===

[00:00:00] Did you catch Anthony Joshua fight the YouTuber last month? November. It's okay if you haven't. I haven't seen the whole fight. I've seen the highlights 'cause I have a friend who really cares about this stuff. So there's this moment, uh, it's a meme now I guess, where Anthony Joshua, one of the best boxers of the past decade, I think just smiles as time freezes and there's this calm of knowing something cool is about to happen, and then he chose the punch and breaks. Logan Paul's jaw, that smile reminds me of something because Joshua, he was never in trouble. He just let Logan Paul have a few rounds. I guess maybe they had an agreement, whatever it was, and then he decided, okay, the exhibition's over.

[00:00:46] Let's finish this. So I keep thinking about that smile as I'm watching everything Google has been doing this week because in the span of 24, maybe 48 hours, Google made two moves that kind of feel a lot like that meme. And I'll, I'll share it in the episode notes in case you dunno what I mean. Like they've been letting everyone have their own headlines.

[00:01:06] Chat g bt this open ai, this Google is behind, blah, blah, blah. And do you know what they did? So over the weekend Google just announced a new protocol, a new thing called Universal Commerce, commerce Protocol, UCP. It's going to be an open standard. This is their words, open standard from Google, designed to let AI agents shop on your behalf.

[00:01:29] So discovery, checkout, payments, post-purchase support, the whole journey. And then on Monday, Google and Apple dropped a joint statement. Now. Google and Apple, that's $7.7 trillion in market cap combined. I don't think that ever happened. If there's a Guinness record for market cap in a joint statement, this wins it.

[00:01:51] So they dropped a joint statement, and I'll read the part of it. The key part of it, because it's kind of big, apple and Google, have entered into a multi-year collaboration under which the next generation of Apple Foundation models will be based on Google's, Gemini and cloud technology. So Apple just admitted publicly that Google's AI is better than theirs, who, nobody knew that, but they're also going to use it to power Siri and everything else they're doing.

[00:02:18] Also, they shopped around and they decided to go with Google. So they, they talked to other frontier model companies. Now you can look at these two. The UCP thing, the protocol and the, the partnership with between Google and Apple has two separate stories. I, I don't think they are. I think there are two moves of the same game in the same game.

[00:02:41] And if you're building for AI agents, optimizing your websites for AI discovery, you're just trying to understand where the agentic web is heading this week matters a lot. So let's get into it.​

[00:02:59] Welcome to No hacks. Before we dive into what Google just did, the one two punch they pulled, let's talk about why this matters. 'cause there's context here that that makes both announcements that Google made land a bit differently, so. AI agents, the idea that AI doesn't just answer your questions in the AI overview or any LLM, basically, it will actually do things for you, book your flights, order groceries for you, handles your returns.

[00:03:29] This has been the promise for quite a while now, and over the past year or so, I think since April, 2025, we've started to see real things happening in this space with one company after another. Not to Paul Thomas Anderson's movie, obviously with one company after another, launching their AI browsing thing, whatever that is, open.

[00:03:51] AI has been pushing into this space really, really hard. They, they launch something they call, I believe, instant checkout, where you can buy stuff directly through chat g pt. In the us. I don't think it works in Europe. They built their own agent commerce protocol with Stripe perplexity. I think partnered with PayPal so you can book travel.

[00:04:11] I tried to, didn't work byproducts even get concert tickets without leaving the chat interface. Now Amazon. Amazon did something funny. Amazon launched this thing they call, uh, shop Direct with a buy for me button, and their AI agent will literally go to other company's websites, other company's websites with no consent and scrape them and like do things on your behalf.

[00:04:35] So it's kinda weird and there's a lot of this. I would call it land grab happening. Everyone's trying to figure out how AI agents are going to interact with commerce, how they'll discover products, how they'll pay, handle all the stuff that happens after you click buy. But here's the problem.

[00:04:52] Everyone is building their own systems. OpenAI has a CP. Amazon has their thing. Perplexity has their integration. If you're a retailer, you're looking at this thinking, is this I six again, when I need to optimize for different browsers in a different way. I hope not. And that's the fragmentation problem.

[00:05:11] It's real. 'cause the web wasn't built for AI agents. It was built for humans with eyeballs and fingers. And we are now retrofitting infrastructure that was designed for a completely, completely different kind of user. And then there's the other piece of context, the assistant wars. So Apple intelligence infamously launched in 2024, and let's not be mean about it.

[00:05:36] It wasn't great. The reception wasn't great. The big Siri upgrade, it was supposed to make it competitive. Got delayed a few times. Never mentioned again after launch. Apple, uh, I think they did something with Chatt PT as a backup option. Not sure how that worked. Meanwhile, Google has Gemini and Gemini has been.

[00:05:58] Underwhelming in the beginning, but since the last version pretty good. Mostly on Android desktop devices. You know, if you're an Apple user, you're not as likely to use Gemini, but now 2 billion active Apple devices will. Be using it. So that's the landscape going into this week.

[00:06:20] Fragmented agent e commerce. Apple, struggling with ai, Google with strong models and strong potential for distribution. And then chatty PT kind of running ahead and stumbling.

[00:06:33] ​

[00:06:36] So let's talk about these two things that Google did one by one. And let's start with UCP, the Universal Commerce Protocol. What, what is Universal Commerce Protocol first place? Well, in Google's words from that announcement, it's an open standard designed to facilitate communication and interoperability between diverse commerce entities.

[00:06:57] Cool. So let's try to make that make more sense. UCP is supposed to be a common language with a shared set of rules that lets AI agents talk to businesses without needing custom integrations for each one. So instead of building a and a connection to Amazon, a connection to target, a connection to Shopify, every Shopify store, an agent can just speak the UCP language and any business that supports UCP can understand it.

[00:07:25] The protocol covers, like I mentioned earlier, the entire shopping journey, discovery, finding products, checkout, actually buying them payments, handling the money part, and and everything else in between. Now, where it gets interesting from a technical standpoint is that UCP is transport agnostic, so it can work over regular rest APIs, which is how most websites and web services communicate today, but also.

[00:07:53] With MCP, the Anthropic-launched Model, Context Protocol and A2 constant A which is Google's own agent to agent protocol. So this is a wrapper around all those. What this means in practice, if you're building an AI agent, and let's say you're using Claude. You can use UCP through MCPI. I'm so sick of the, these acronyms and abbreviations, but I guess HT TP became a norm.

[00:08:20] One of these will be the norm in a few years, hopefully. So if you are using Google's infrastructure, you can use a two, A agent to agent protocol and UCP Universal Commerce Protocol does not care what you have under the hood. The architecture is completely modular. There are capabilities, core features like checkout, order management, identity linking, and then their extensions to add things like discounts, fulfillment, options, loyalty programs.

[00:08:51] Business can pick and choose what they want to support. They just publish a profile at a standard location in a file called slash wellknown slash ucp, and that essentially tells the agent, this is what I can do. The agent discovers that they negotiate, they handle whatever they wanna do, and then they do the transaction.

[00:09:12] So the payments are handled through something that's called payment handlers. And I'm reading from the documentation here. They're pro, they're pluggable. Google Pay, for example, is a handler. Shop pay is a handler, stripe, whatever. They can all be handlers. They work in the UCP. Ecosystem. The merchant in that well-known slash UCP file advertises which payment methods they accept, and the agent will pick one.

[00:09:38] So the agent picks which one they want to choose out the available option, the same way a user when they're shopping and there are multiple payment options in your store. The same way a human user would choose the option they want to use. How the agent does it well, that depends on who set up the agent and what the instructions were.

[00:09:56] Simple as that. So any new payment methods, they can join the ecosystem without requiring changes to the entire protocol. They can just extend what UCP is offering.

[00:10:05] That was a lot of abbreviations, a lot of acronyms, a lot of tech talk. Maybe a little bit too much. So who developed UCP? Well, Google Co-developed it, led the development of it, is what I would say with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, target, and Walmart.

[00:10:21] Those are big names. Now it's endorsed by over 20 more. Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Stripe, best Buy, home Depot, Macy's, Lyft, car, Zalando, and Shopify. Shopify put out their own technical deep dive on the protocol. They're treating this as a real thing and not a Google PR exercise. This is, this is a big deal.

[00:10:47] It's not fully out there yet, but it has potential to completely shake up. The state of the agenda web. So, uh, Shopify has, has a blog post that that's talking about the philosophy behind it, the design decisions, how it handles the complexity of real world commerce, different payment options based on the card contents, blah, blah, blah.

[00:11:06] So what does this let you do right now? Well, Google is building the first reference implementation and soon, soon you will be able to check out directly from AI mode in Google search. You know, the, the annoying, the zero click thing. Now you'll be able to buy without going to the website when this is a thing.

[00:11:27] And then from the Gemini app, if you're researching a product to through Google's Gemini interface and instead of clicking to go to a website, add cart there, you just buy, just buy right there in, in Gemini, I, I wanna see it work first. It looks promising. I'll give 'em that. They're also launching something that they call business agent.

[00:11:51] So this lats brands have AI chat representatives directly on Google search, looking up a product, and you can chat with a brand's AI agent to ask questions, get recommendations. I can. Virtual AI sales associate that lives on a serp. It feels weird. Feels weird. Let, let's see, let's see this in practice and then they have something called direct offers.

[00:12:18] And this is the ads advertising play. 'cause there has to be an advertising play. Retailers can present exclusive discounts to shoppers inside AI mode. So if you're searching for something, expressing intent to buy and a relevant retailer can pop up with a special deal. It's ads for agent era, something we've all been waiting for for so long.

[00:12:41] So let's be clear about something else here. UCP is open source. It's on GitHub. It's licensed under Apache license by any formal definition. This is an open protocol, but, but Google wrote this. Google controls the reference. Implementation. Google is the first and biggest surface actually using this. Now, the question that hangs over any open standard, which from a dominant player, is how open is it really when one company is the gatekeeper?

[00:13:19] Look, my background is in WordPress. We kind of have a situation there with automatic. Not controlling WordPress, but controlling WordPress. I'm not saying, I'm not saying this is going to ruin UCP. I'm not saying this is ruining WordPress. Maybe it's not helping. I'm saying it's worth being reasonable about the dynamics here.

[00:13:41] Android is open source too.

[00:13:46] It's Google's open source. So the counter argument is that this kind of infrastructure needs someone to build it. The fragmentation problem is real. It's happening right now. The only reason you haven't heard about it is because the implementation is still in the early stages and having a common language for gente commerce.

[00:14:06] I think that's useful. And Google, whatever else you think about them. I, I hear a lot of people don't like them. They have the resources and the industry relationships to actually make something like this happen. I think the other AI companies don't,

[00:14:22] Shopify being involved is, is another interesting part here.

[00:14:26] They're not a affiliated with Google. They're not a subsidiary of Google. They have their own interests and they're huge. They're a massive company. They seem, according to their releases, press releases. They seem enthusiastic about UCP. Their blog post talks about how the protocol models commerce right, and makes it programmable.

[00:14:46] I don't disagree in theory, but it's a strong endorsement from a company that handles billions in transactions for millions of merchants. So UCPA protocol that could become the infrastructure layer for how AI agents buy things backed by major retailers, major payment providers launching with Google's AI services.

[00:15:09] Open source, Google controlled. That's punch one. 

[00:15:13] ​

[00:15:15] Now let's talk about the other one. Monday morning joint statement from Google and Apple. And again, I want to quote this directly because the language here, I think matters. Apple and Google have entered into a multi-year collaboration under which the next generation of Apple Foundation models will be based on Google's Gemini models and cloud technology.

[00:15:38] These models will help power future Apple Intelligence features including a more personalized Siri coming this year. That's a lot. Let's try to unpack that first. Apple is using Gemini as the foundation for their AI models, not a fallback like JGPT Foundation, not as an optional integration. The foundation, apple Foundation models, whatever they were, will be built on Google's technology.

[00:16:08] Massive. This is massive. Now, second, this powers Apple Intelligence, not just Siri. So the statement specifically mentions a more personalized Siri, but also future Apple Intelligence features that could be every single thing. 'cause when AI moves to the OS level, and now it can now every phone in the world, or 99% of the phones in the world, Android and iOS, they'll have a version of Gemini powering everything, writing tools, the photo search notification summaries across iPhone, iPad, Mac, apple Watch, and all the Android devices.

[00:16:54] Now, third. This is not a, a pilot or experiment or however you call those stupid things in the AI world when you know, we want to see if this works and then it fails. This is a multi-year deal, I think priced at a billion per year. Apple is committing to this partnership for an extended period. A multi-year could mean a lot of things, but it's more than one, some context on what this doesn't mean.

[00:17:20] Apple is being clear. That everything, the user interacts will still be Apple technology. Apple is still keeping the relationship with their users or they claim. They will be, Gemini will be powering the models, but Apple will deploy them with, you'll like this with their own privacy architecture processing happening on device or through Apple's.

[00:17:43] Private cloud compute. No Gemini logo, no user data going to Google. Apple's privacy standards are going to be maintained here. So the claim

[00:17:56] so Gemini will be the foundation, not the interface. It's being used to train and power apple's models. But what runs on your iPhone is an Apple thing wrapped in apple's privacy protections. And why is this a big deal? Well, first, there's admission embedded in the announcement. Apple said that after careful evaluation, they determine that that Google's AI technology provides the most capable foundation.

[00:18:25] Apple is a company that historically built most things in-house. They make their own chips. They make their own operating system, their own software. For them to publicly say that someone else's technology is better, significant Second. The, the, the elephant getting smaller by the day in the room.

[00:18:44] The open AI angle. Well, remember Apple tried to play with Chatt PD and integrate into Siri last year that was positioned as solution for complex queries within Siri and all that.

[00:18:54] Now with this deal, the intelligence layer, the OS layer, the OS ai layer, the Think Powering Siri and your devices, that's going to be Gemini. Now reports say. That Apple talked to both open AI and Entropic before choosing Google.

[00:19:12] They evaluated the options and decided at this time, Gemini and Google were the better bet.

[00:19:20] Third, google already pays Apple billions of dollars every year to be the default search engine on Safari. That deal has been under a lot of scrutiny.

[00:19:33] There's been talk about what happens if it gets removed. Well, now Google has another position on Apple devices. They're not just the search engine, they're the A I A engine powering Apple. So we're moving from browser to os and I think this is sort of a natural progression for, for these AI assistance.

[00:19:54] And even if that search deal went away. Google would still be powering the intelligence layer on every single iPhone. They cannot, there's no regulatory body that's going to argue with that. So from Google's perspective, this is the distribution they've always wanted. Gemini is good. It's going to be running under the hood, but it's going to be running on 2 billion active Apple devices.

[00:20:17] We're not talking about Google search as a default in safari. No. We're talking about everywhere. Every app that uses AI on your device, on your. Apple device,

[00:20:28] so we have those two announcements. We have a commerce protocol, and we have the ideal and AI partnership.

[00:20:36] Now, I mentioned earlier, these kind of play together. You cannot look at one without looking at the other one Also. The first two announcements from Google in 2026, and it's a one-two punch within 24, maybe 36 hours is massive. So here's what I think, why, why these matter together. FUCP is about controlling the infrastructure for how agents.

[00:21:03] Run transactions. If this becomes a standard, if retailers adopted, if other AI platforms support it, and Google has built the rails that the agent e-commerce runs on, no one has done that yet. Even agents built on other company's technologies would be using Google's protocol.

[00:21:22] The Apple deal, it's about distribution. So you put Google's AI onto the most popular consumer devices in the world if Siri becomes genuinely capable that's a huge surface for the adjunct web. Hundreds of millions of people with an AI agent in their pocket.

[00:21:38] And you don't need to go to a browser. You don't need to go to chat g PT or Gemini or whatever. LLM, it's right there. AI becomes Samantha from her. It's not, it's no longer a browser extension. Put those two together and you get the full picture of all this Google's AI on Apple's hardware, potentially doing transactions through Google's commerce protocol with Google's ad serving offers in the flow.

[00:22:04] That's a lot of surface area, and that means that everything we've been using so far becomes less and less relevant as this gets adopted. But I wanna be careful. I'm not saying this is a dystopian outcome. There are real benefits to this standardization. Of course, there are benefits to having capable AI assistance.

[00:22:24] Of course, the fragmentation and. In agentic commerce, and we are just getting started, but the fragmentation is genuinely a problem. Keeping up is near impossible. Someone building this common infrastructure is, it's good for the ecosystem no matter how it plays out. This is a good thing. It's also worth being clear about who's building the infrastructure and what their interests are.

[00:22:49] Google is an advertising company, UCP. The proposal, the standard includes those direct offers, the ads inside AI mode, the business model is built into the protocol. I, I, I don't think that's a bad thing, but let's be realistic about what it's, it's also worth watching what open in open source means in practice.

[00:23:14] Open source doesn't mean open governance. Anyone can look at the code on GitHub, but can anyone but Google influence what happens with it? Let's see. Let's see what happens. The spec is on GitHub. Google controls the roadmap, so the reference implementation is all Google's, the first surface that's using it, is going to belong to Google and the road. Map for UCP is illuminating.

[00:23:37] It's great. It includes multi item cards, loyalty programs, cross sells and upsell modules, gro global expansion. Like everything. This is not a checkout button. This is a full layer for e-commerce, a new layer for e-commerce. So discovery transaction, post-purchase. It can all work within this protocol.

[00:23:56] The whole relationship between buyers and sellers can be managed through the protocol, but. Let me, let me talk about practical implications of this. Again, what does this mean for the people building for the Agentic web for you, the listener? So if you're a developer or someone with been an e-commerce website, or you're building AI power products, UCP is something you should absolutely be paying attention to.

[00:24:22] The fact that it's compatible with current standards, MCP. That's interesting. Rest API. Very interesting. There's potential for cross ecosystem tooling. But adopting UCP also means you're drinking Google's Kool-Aid and buying into their infrastructure to some degree, and that's a trade off and it's worth thinking about.

[00:24:44] So if you're a retailer or you are running an e-commerce business, the new merchant center attributes Google announced are worth looking at. They're designed for conversational discovery, not keywords, but things like answers to common product questions and compatible accessories. This is a new optimization game.

[00:25:02] This is. Don't hate me, but SEO for ai, I don't wanna say GEO, but this, this is new. This is something completely different. So you should also think about what it means when purchases happen off your website. If checkout happens in AI mode, the customer never even knows your logo. Well, maybe they see your logo, but I dunno what, what font to use.

[00:25:26] They never see the store. It's convenient for them. But the relationship that you have with your customer, they will not, let's say they see your website in a month and they bought from you, they will not know this was you. Yeah. You, you're still the merchant of records. You, you keep all the records, all the transactions, you own that data and Google has been very, very clear about that.

[00:25:49] But it happens somewhere else and you become something like a, I dunno, a version of drop shipping. So for the web, more broadly, we're watching the web get rebuilt. Like this is, this is the internet, the, the only internet that we've had since, since day one is being rebuilt and we are witnessing that real time.

[00:26:11] The infrastructure layer that was designed for humans with browsers and typing and looking at pages one at a time is being supplemented and even replaced with this potentially by infrastructure designed specifically for AI agents. And it's exciting. Google is positioning itself here to be central to both sides of that transition.

[00:26:31] They power the AI that browses on the user's behalf, and they're building the protocol that lets AI transact with business. That's too much leverage. Okay. And if you look at some estimates for how big AI powered retail will get. By 2030, according to McKinsey, I think, uh, the estimate was three to $5 trillion.

[00:26:57] The, the, the entire market. Now I have no idea if that's right. Maybe McKinsey used JGPD to write the report as 'cause they do. But this is big, potentially big and it's growing and there's no doubt that we will shop this way at some point. So, is Google out for blood? Are they trying to put open AI in their place?

[00:27:24] I, I, I don't know. I dunno. They're not messing around anymore. For the past couple of years, the narrative has been that Google's behind, they're playing catch up to chat GPT. Just slow to respond. What is Google doing? They had their own code read before OpenAI had their code read a month ago. It's insane.

[00:27:44] But then. Chad GT five happened. Ugh, Gemini three happened. Yay. And you know, maybe they were just, they knew what they were doing the whole time. This week, the, the last few days it felt different.

[00:27:59] Two announcements. So close together, two massive announcements. This is going to change the playing field forever. And what they said is we are building the infrastructure layer and also powering the AI on.

[00:28:14] Pretty much every mobile device in the world. I mean, they're not being defensive anymore, at the very least. So the web, the web was built for humans. And these announcements, they're two huge, maybe two biggest moves so far towards rebuilding the web four agents. And Google is positioning themselves to be at the center of both sides of that transition.

[00:28:42] So the question isn't really whether this future is coming. It's coming. Agents are going to shop, assistants are going to get smarter, and commerce is going to change forever, and there's no going back. So the question is who builds the infrastructure? Who writes these protocols and who controls the surfaces where all of these transactions happened?

[00:29:07] I don't know, but we better get involved. 'cause if Google built and owns everything, the entire internet in this agent era, that's not good. I don't want him to control everything. So this week Google smiled like Joshua, and then it threw a punch. And then I threw another one.

[00:29:27] It's fun. It's exciting.

[00:29:30] That's it for this episode. I'm sunny and thank you for listening to No Hacks. Please consider rating, reviewing and sharing this episode with someone. Talk to you next week. 

[00:29:40] ​