In my last post, I referenced how there is now a growing split between the “human” web and the “agentic” web, where AI agents are becoming an additional audience/profile alongside the “traditional” human visitors we have been optimizing for for years.
This shift is now becoming more aggressive, especially when it comes to the transactional web in the form of agentic commerce. 2026 will see the accelerated adoption of this method, where store owners will now have to cater to and optimize for both the human and agentic visitor concurrently.
The recent launch of Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) from Google underlines the push towards this integration of AI and ecommerce experiences.
What Is Agentic Commerce?
Agentic commerce is when agents complete purchases autonomously on behalf of users. Now, a human can engage with a large language model platform, where the agent will browse and purchase from a site on behalf (and with approval) of the human. Not only is the agent acting as the gatekeeper for information gain and influencing decisions, but they are also acting as the gatekeeper for the transaction itself.
This is a step beyond delegating an LLM to act as a recommendation agent or a method of validation, but now transfers authority to actually transact.
Enter ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol)
On Sept. 29, 2025, OpenAI and Stripe announced their partnership and, within this, launched ACP, an open standard that defines how AI agents, merchants, and payment providers interact to complete agentic and programmatic purchases.
On the same day, OpenAI detailed platforms that were immediately able to benefit from agentic commerce, including Shopify and Etsy, with others following suit using the protocol, including Walmart and Instacart.
From a CMS point of view, Shopify hit the ground running by enabling ACP for over 1 million merchants from the day of the announcement. WooCommerce has followed suit more recently by announcing it will be part of Stripe’s launch of Agentic Commerce Suite, which will allow even more merchants the ability to sell products through various AI-based platforms.
But ACP was launched three months ago, and as we now know, things move fast…
UCP: Google’s Answer To The Immersive Agentic Commerce Experience
Google just announced the launch of Universal Commerce Protocol, which widens some boundaries applied by ACP by tackling a broader problem, providing any AI surface (like Search AI Mode or Gemini) a common language to discover merchants, understand their capabilities, and orchestrate full journeys from discovery through order management, as well as engagement beyond a purchase (also made seamless using Google Pay). This is also done by integrating with other existing standards, including APIs, Agent2Agent (A2A), and the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
| Aspect | ACP (OpenAI) | UCP (Google) |
|---|---|---|
| Primary focus | Agent‑led commerce in ChatGPT and ACP‑aware agents. | Unified rail for many agents/surfaces talking to merchants. |
| Journey Coverage | Product feed, checkout, fulfillment, delegated payment. | Discovery, checkout, discounts, fulfillment, order management, payments. |
| Driver | OpenAI + Stripe & ecosystem partners. | Google + retailers/platforms (Shopify, Etsy, Walmart, etc.). |
Here, Google adds to the possibilities of the commerce experience, where SEOs can adopt both ACP and UCP in order to accommodate both platforms and ecosystems.
This will only become more immersive as 2026 progresses. Google has a great advantage of knowing a lot about individual users, and features such as AI features inside Gmail illustrate Google can utilize and understand much more context about individuals in order to provide an even more frictionless experience.
Why This Matters For SEOs
As SEOs, we’ve spent over a generation optimizing for humans, albeit for various personas or ICPs. While we are still required to do this, we must now include the agent as an additional consideration. This does pose another challenge: that AI agents don’t browse pages but instead query APIs, parse product feeds, and evaluate structured data.
As such, we need to optimize for this. Maybe I can give it a name…
ACO: Agentic Commerce Optimization
I don’t want to trigger you by introducing yet another acronym to what seems to be a previous year of new acronyms, but for the sake of this post, let’s pretend that ACO is something you’ve been told to do now, as well as SEO, even though this is still SEO.
What would I need to consider and optimize for for successful ACO?
- Crawlability: Agents still follow links, take journeys, and understand IA.
- Format: Content needs to be concise with less fluff, but enough to ensure unique value has been added, and that it provides consistency throughout the site as a whole.
- Structured Data: Agents will become more reliant on existing standards, especially if they’re open source.
- Brand Authority And Sentiment: Populating your products well is, of course, paramount, but without positive brand sentiment, you have the challenge of convincing the agent to cite you as part of that discovery, then have to convince the human who will have that feedback presented to them. Third-party perspectives will become a larger contribution towards some of the agents’ grounding procedures before any agentic commerce begins.
Sounds familiar, right? While ACP is a connector between your site and the platforms that allow agents to use it, and CMSs are out there to make that connection as seamless as possible, this isn’t just a switch where, when switched on, is automatically optimized.
ACO = SEO.
Schema.org Is The Glue
Last month at Google Search Central Live in Zurich, Pascal Fleury went into detail about structured data for Shopping, where we can see that, while “schema.org is the glue that holds [structured data] together,” there are still other industry standards, such as GS1, that will add even more granular detail to products that will not only help inform agents on really specific details but also understand that you’re a great source of information to continue ingest from.
Product schema, pricing, availability, reviews, FAQs, shipping options, and other logistics, loyalty schemes – all of this structured data will need close optimization. If it’s missing or incorrect, you’re invisible to agent-mediated discovery.
Test The Agents
Even before your store is ACP-enabled, test how agents perceive your products. Ask platforms about products in your category. Do they surface your brand? How do they describe your products and complementary offerings? What information are they presenting, from both first-party and third-party perspectives? And more importantly, what is missing that you expected to be present?
Then, enable. What are the differences? Compare the results.
What Can I Do About It Now?
ACP
For WooCommerce and Wix, you will unfortunately need to join Stripe’s waitlist for ACS. Shopify users also have to join their own waitlist. Until then, we will have to wait until full rollout, but expect this to accelerate in Q1 of 2026.
If you work with a site where you have to integrate ACP directly into your CMS, any early adopters will perhaps benefit from early discovery, while the other CMSs catch up and competition is lower. So here, while this will require more resources, you will be able to take advantage of what ACP has to offer while most wait for their CMS platform to create the solution for them.
UCP
This is extremely fresh information, but I suggest that some time to understand it in detail, as well as experiment where possible using their documentation and GitHub repo, I know that’s how a lot of my time will be spent in the next few weeks.
More Resources:
Featured Image: Koupei Studio/Shutterstock
