In recent weeks, Google and Microsoft have unveiled AI updates that can condense discovery, decision, and checkout into a single interface.
Google introduced the Universal Commerce Protocol, allowing AI experiences that can complete the full buyer journey without visiting a brand’s website. Microsoft announced Copilot Checkout, enabling in-conversation purchasing inside Copilot. Additionally, Google’s Gemini expansion into consumer devices, including powering Siri, signals that AI-driven discovery is moving beyond search engines into everyday interfaces.
Taken together, these announcements point to a clear shift. Discovery, evaluation, and transactions are increasingly happening inside AI systems, rather than on brand-owned pages.
Here’s what these changes need for marketers.
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Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol moves buying into AI
Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) introduces an open standard that lets AI experiences like Google Search’s AI Mode and Gemini discover products, manage carts, and complete purchases without sending users to a traditional website. This is seen as a response to the OpenAI guided Agentic Commerce Protocol, while incorporating and taking advantage of existing Google products like Google Merchant Center and Google Pay.
This further marks a fundamental shift from search to site to checkout toward agent-based commerce.
What this means for marketers
- Visibility increasingly depends on how well AI systems understand your products, not just how well pages rank
- Product feeds, structured data, and merchant integrations become even more important SEO assets
- Some conversions will happen without a site visit, further influencing how performance is measured
Strong, foundational SEO still matters, but how well a product page is built and how product data is shared is growing in importance.
Microsoft Copilot Checkout enables instant conversion and brand agent integration
Microsoft’s Copilot Checkout allows users to discover and buy products directly inside Copilot conversations, while merchants remain the seller of record and keep customer data.
At the same time, Microsoft is extending AI beyond Copilot with Brand Agents, which allow companies to deploy AI-driven shopping and guidance experiences on their own sites. These agents operate in the brand’s voice, draw from first-party data, and are designed to scale quickly without rebuilding existing experiences.
What this means for marketers
- AI assistants are becoming a new type of storefront
- Zero-click outcomes will expand beyond answers into actual transactions
- Clean, complete product data will influence whether AI can confidently recommend and sell your products
SEO teams will need closer alignment with eCommerce, feeds, and platform teams than ever before.
Gemini powering Siri brings AI discovery to the device layer
In a major acceleration moment, Apple announced that Google’s Gemini AI will power Siri and other Apple Intelligence-based offerings. It puts a large language model at the center of one of the most widely used consumer interfaces in the world.
Traditional search still anchors discovery, but voice and conversation are becoming common entry points.
What this means for marketers
- Content and products should still be structured for people first, but keep the platforms that they’ll be surfaced by in mind
- Brand visibility will increasingly hinge on being a trusted, machine-readable source
- SEO expands beyond Google results into operating systems and assistants
If AI can’t confidently understand your brand, it’s less likely to surface it.
3 steps marketers should take now
As AI becomes more deeply integrated in discovery, product research, and transactions, strong SEO foundations become even more critical. Clear structure, trusted content, and high-quality product data are what enable AI systems to understand, surface, and act on your brand with confidence in 2026.
To prepare for these changes, marketers should take these three steps:
1. Make your products visible to AI
Audit product feeds, structured data, and schema with AI discovery in mind. If an AI system can’t clearly understand what you sell, who it’s for, and how it’s purchased, it’s less likely to recommend or transact on your behalf. Stay informed about these cutting edge agentic developments and sign up for related the waitlists that make sense for your business, through Google’s UCP Integration Interest Form and the Copilot Checkout: Merchant Application.
2. Redefine how you measure SEO success
Prepare for more zero-click and in-AI conversions. Shift reporting beyond sessions and pageviews toward visibility, product inclusion, assisted conversions, and downstream revenue impact.
3. Treat technical readiness as a competitive advantage
Evaluate whether your eCommerce platform, data infrastructure, and tracking can support AI-driven discovery and checkout. Brands with clean integrations, fast feeds, and reliable data flows will adapt faster as AI commerce scales.
Join Amsive leaders for a webinar to discuss the structural shifts reshaping performance marketing in 2026, or let’s talk about how Amsive can help you supercharge your eCommerce marketing strategy.
