An agentic commerce protocol is an open standard that lets an AI agent not just recommend a product but actually buy it — by defining how a merchant exposes product data, pricing, availability, and checkout in a machine-readable form an agent can act on.
As of mid-2026 the prominent examples are the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), developed by OpenAI with Stripe, and Google's Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). They differ in shape and naming but point the same way: a structured product feed plus a checkout an agent can complete. Payment and distribution layers (such as Stripe's Agentic Commerce Suite) are emerging to bridge across protocols so a merchant integrates once.
The protocols handle the plumbing of the transaction. They don't decide which product an agent recommends — that still comes down to catalog quality, entity clarity, and corroboration. Protocol details are moving quickly; the durable takeaway is that a clean, structured catalog feeds whichever standard wins.
