Jesse Cunningham Explains Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol

0:00Google just released something that's going to change the entire internet. It's called the UCP, the Google Universal Commerce Protocol. It's a mouthful and it looks like nerd talk. Like a lot of people are going to discredit this, but I'm telling you, this is a whole new thing that can give you opportunity for your e-commerce website or totally sink the ship. You have to pay attention to this.

0:20We're going to go through our big sheet here on what we are doing right now inside the 1% e-com club to help you out. I want to jump into this LinkedIn post by Mehere. He says, AI shopping is about to skip the website. That is a big opening line. We've all seen it where Google, they want people to stay on Google. Google makes money with ads.

0:42Google only makes money with ads if people use Google. So it goes without question. Why do they want this? And most SEO teams do not see it yet. Google quietly introduced something called UCP, the Universal Commerce Protocol. And on the surface, it looks like a developer thing, but in reality, it's a new discovery layer for commerce inside AI interfaces. So think Google AI mode, Gemini, and others.

1:07And it will allow us to discover products, check inventory and prices, understand variance, ship in availability, and even complete the checkout. So if you have your phone, you're on Google, you'll be able to just buy things with a click of the button without ever leaving Google. So the trick is, which is what we're going to talk about here, how to prepare your website to show up because some websites are going to be invisible because they didn't set themselves up for success. Now, I'm going to give you a glimpse into the future.

1:34I'm going to type into AI mode in Google. This is AI mode. Find me good headphones under $300 that arrive fast. And you're going to see that Google does an okay job, but I want to understand how does the AI parse through this information? This is going to help us understand how to prepare. We're going to go deep. Right? So off the bat, I asked for good headphones. So Google, you know, needs to know best and good headphones. That's easy under $300. Okay. Good.

1:58That arrive fast. And Google said, all right, here's some good ones. Beats studio pro it's going to arrive by January 14th from best buy beat and H. Now, do you see the blue links? I can click here. I have to click through to the website boom to make the purchase, but that's going to stop. That's going to end. There's going to be opportunity for people to buy boom right here, right?

2:19We don't have to go to the website anymore. And that's what we have to prepare for because, and I think it's a great thing. We are going to be able to beat our competitors by being more prepared to them. And that's what this video is about. So coming over here, right? UCP, what is it all about? We talked about it built with partners like Shopify.

2:35Luckily in the 1% ecom club, we use Shopify target Etsy, Wayfair Walmart aimed at agentic shopping experiences, and it lets AI agents automate the entire shopping journey to find, compare, check out, and even do post purchase support. Listen, Google does not want us to click through to websites ever again. It's moving away from that. It wants to have control of everything because it's big data company too, but that's a rabbit hole. We don't go down. Why is this a big deal?

3:04Product discovery is shifted from ranking pages to querying protocols. So back in the day, what was it? We rank keywords. Now we can do both for protocols and ranking pages. I mean, there's going to be opportunity for both, but let's prepare for the AI stuff. AI agents no longer need to scrape, crawl and scrape your website to understand products. That's what UCP is going to give us. It's not going to have to scrape it.

3:27We're just going to be able to give it through structured data. Instead of page SEO, brands will compete on machine readable commerce data quality and structured, reliable data becomes the new competitive frontier for AI driven sales. That's what I want. I want a competitive edge. And I think this is a great thing. I'm very excited. This is like good news that I haven't heard in a long time.

3:48This is very good news because I know a lot of our competitors are not going to do anything about this and they're going to kind of go invisible over time. Whereas our websites are going to rank higher and higher. Now we're going to get into what e-commerce SEO should be doing right now. But before we do, I like this article by search engine land on who created this.

4:06I like it. The headline Google's new open e-commerce or commerce standard aims to do what reduce cart abandonment. I think that's so interesting. I'm going to come back to that and enable agent led buying across search, Gemini and retailer systems. Now I highlighted reduce cart abandonment because I think it's an interesting thing. I can imagine Google is going to these different suppliers and saying, look, you guys are going to make more money because people like on Amazon, they just click a button. They buy the thing, right?

4:33Well we can provide that for you too. I imagine in this speculation, but I imagine that's the spin. We're going to reduce cart abandonment. Therefore we're going to make you more money, but Google will most likely make more money too, because users stay on their platform and they own the traffic. If you own the traffic, you kind of own everything. Very interesting.

4:51Coming down here and we're going to get into this here in a second, right? But coming down here, UCP works with existing standards right here. Google co-developed this with partners such as Shopify and I'm very happy we promote Shopify in the 1% e-com club, right? Build a website on Shopify. Seems like a good idea right now and more than 20 additional companies across retail payments have already endorsed this thing. So jumping into here, what e-com SEO should be doing right now? Number one, product data quality.

5:19So you're going to audit your product catalog, your titles, your descriptions, your SKUs, your inventory levels, your variant clarity. Listen, ensure data is accurate and machine readable. This is the basics. You should be doing this anyways, right? But let's just make sure it's right. Now structured machine readable feeds. So feeds must expose product data clearly to AI agents. Structured data. So schema product feeds need to be complete, accurate, and up to date. So many e-com stores don't do schema rich data, structured data rather. They don't do it well. They don't do it well.

5:52We talk about it in the community. Exposed by ability to AI. So it's not enough to be crawlable. Your system needs to be queryable. This means working with engineer to support UCP style APIs or agent ready endpoints. Now integration and timeline snapshot. UCP was introduced at NRF and is already backed by major commerce players. Like we said, Google plans to use UCP and AI search mode, AI mode search and Gemini for native checkout experiences.

6:19And we're in early rollout. So broader rollouts in 2026 and beyond. And anything we do right now to prepare for this, this upcoming thing, the UCP will help us. In my opinion, my recommendation to all my clients is, listen, let's prepare right now. It can do only and beyond and listen. And to take a hard stop, listen, anything we do right now to prepare for this future, because the future is coming.

6:46Google and all aspects wants to keep users on its platform. Let's get ready. Everything we do right now to prepare is going to benefit us in the meantime. That's my recommendation to my clients, right? Anything we do to prepare for the future is only going to help us right now with current SEO and AI stuff. So let's just do it. So what this means for Shopify brands, Shopify merchants are positioned well.

7:08The platform already supports AI ready tooling, such as catalog, universal cart, agentic integrations, but you still may need to clean and enrich product feeds, which we teach, ensure inventory and variants are correct, partner with devs to expose these agent friendly endpoints. Now, here's the SEO payoff, better discovery in AI driven shopping channels. This is not going to be like the end all.

7:32This is going to be one new discovery layer, right? One new discovery channel, but it's going to help SEO too on other layers. Faster conversion with AI led checkout, new revenue without users visiting your site. That sounds good, right? It's going to, it's going to crush informational websites, informational websites. They're on their way out. They've been on their way out. Right? So we have to prepare traditional SEO visibility page ranks still matters, but agentic commerce adds new layers of competition.

7:59The strategic SEO shift SEO is no longer just about keywords and links. You know this already, but now we're seeing why and how the how is UCP. Like they've showed us their hand. This is what's going to happen. It's now about data quality, product signals, and AI readable commerce capabilities. So we all know we have to create websites for two parties. And it's always been this way.

8:23You have to create websites for Google and search engines, as well as the consumer for conversion rate optimization. Now all of that consideration for CRO on your website, if you are in the e-commerce space is still going to matter, but it's going to matter less, especially if you can tie right into this new UCP that Google is supplying. Just imagine if you had Google act like Amazon.

8:45I think that's what they want. You can click a button on Amazon and order this and Amazon gives you recommendations because it knows what you've ordered. Well, Google I think is going to do the same thing. You click a button. So we need to make sure our websites are integrated into this new system. Now I want to invite you to the 1% e-com club. We have testimonials here.

9:05You will see Shopify websites absolutely crushing it. Within e-commerce, we are focused on high ticket e-commerce, like high ticket items above $5,000. But if you're just a regular e-com brand, we still have things that can help you. This is what it looks like in the classroom. There is a lot here. If you want to be surrounded by people who are making a lot of money in e-commerce, even if you're a newbie, right? Come join us.

9:27Build an asset that has exit value. You build this thing, right? If you're successful, you can sell this thing. Just like informational like niche websites were in the past. Well, e-commerce is still doing really darn well. So if you're not in here yet, I want to invite you and yeah, thanks for watching this one. Let me know in the comments, what do you think? The UCP, it's kind of crazy, right? But at least we kind of see the hand of Google, like where it's going.