Agentic commerce

What is the Agentic Commerce Protocol?

An open standard co-developed by Stripe and OpenAI for letting AI agents transact with merchants. Stripe describes it as giving merchants a single integration through which they can “start selling through AI agents while retaining full control over what’s sold, how their brand shows up, and how orders are fulfilled”, and it is deliberately not tied to Stripe’s own processing: a business on another payment provider can still adopt it. Its first large deployment is Instant Checkout in ChatGPT Shopping, launched with US Etsy sellers and extending to Shopify merchants.

The design carries a division of labour worth noticing. The assistant owns the conversation and the recommendation; the merchant remains the seller of record, fulfils the order and keeps the customer relationship; the protocol standardises what passes between them, so a shop does not need a separate integration for every agent that might one day sell its products. That single-integration promise is the reason payment companies, platforms and retailers lined up behind an open standard rather than each cutting private deals with each assistant.

How does Google's agentic checkout work?

Google announced agentic checkout for Search, including AI Mode, in November 2025: when an item fits the shopper’s budget, “Google can do the heavy lifting” and buy it on the merchant’s site using Google Pay, after the shopper has confirmed the purchase and shipping details. Launch merchants included Wayfair, Chewy, Quince and select Shopify stores. The pattern is the same as OpenAI’s in the part that matters: the agent executes, and a human explicitly confirms.

The confirmation step is not decoration. Every shipped agentic-commerce flow so far keeps a human approval between the agent’s recommendation and the money moving, which is the design that makes the category tolerable to merchants and shoppers at all. It is also the pattern to expect anywhere an agent touches money or inventory: recommendation by machine, commitment by person, with the approval recorded.

Why does it matter for visibility?

Because it collapses the funnel. In classic search, being found and being bought were separate steps with a website in between; in agentic commerce the recommendation surface and the checkout are the same place. That raises the stakes on AI shopping visibility: the carousel an agent buys from is assembled from structured product data, so the merchants who win it are the ones whose feeds, prices and availability are machine-readable and current, not the ones with the best landing page.

Is your catalogue in the answers agents will act on?

Related terms

• ChatGPT ShoppingChatGPT Shopping is the product-results experience inside ChatGPT: when a question shows shopping intent, the assistant renders a carousel of product cards with images, prices and reviews.
• AI shopping visibilityAI shopping visibility is the measure of whether a company's products appear in the product carousels AI assistants show shoppers, on surfaces such as ChatGPT Shopping and Google AI Mode.
• Product feedA product feed is the structured file or API stream of a shop's products: titles, identifiers, prices, availability and attributes, kept current as stock changes.