Google’s Universal Cart shopping tool launches in the US

Google made Universal Cart available to US users after previewing it at I/O in May. It lets shoppers save products from multiple retailers found in Search and the Gemini app into one cart that persists, sends alerts on price drops and restocks, surfaces promo codes, and factors in credit card perks when suggesting how to pay.

Checkout runs through Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, an open standard introduced earlier this year to let AI agents and retailers work together across the shopping journey. It joins AI Mode product discovery and "Let Google Call," which phones local stores to check stock.

This is a practical feature, and we'll say so plainly: a cart that follows you across stores and pings you when a price drops is useful. It's the browser-tab chaos of holiday shopping, cleaned up.

The strategic piece is the protocol underneath. If checkout increasingly happens through Google's standard, Google sits between shoppers and retailers at the moment money moves. That is a lot of leverage for a company that already controls where product searches start.

The credit-card-perk feature is clever and a little telling. It means Google knows your wallet, your wishlist and your price sensitivity in one place. Helpful for the shopper; extraordinarily valuable for an ad business.

I'm watching for how retailers respond. Some will welcome the traffic; others will worry about becoming interchangeable line items in someone else's cart. Rivals like Amazon and OpenAI are chasing the same agentic-commerce prize, so the fight over who owns checkout is just starting.

Big tech companies are racing to make AI assistants useful beyond answering questions by letting them shop and transact on users' behalf.