Google Launches Universal Cart, a Single AI-Tracked List for Shopping Across Retailers

Google began rolling out Universal Cart to users in the United States on Thursday, a shopping tool built to track products a person saves while browsing Search and the Gemini app, no matter how many retailers or days pass between finding an item and buying it. The company said in a post on its official blog that the feature is meant to replace the usual tangle of open tabs, bookmarks and screenshots shoppers rely on to keep track of things they are considering.

The cart lets a shopper save items found through AI Mode in Search or through conversations with Gemini, then return to find them waiting, along with whatever price history, stock status or deal information has accumulated since. It is the clearest step yet in Google's push to turn its search and chatbot products into a running shopping assistant rather than a one-time lookup tool, and it lands in the middle of a broader, uneven race among tech companies to make "agentic" shopping actually stick with consumers.

What the tool does

According to Google's announcement, Universal Cart draws on the company's Shopping Graph, a catalog Google has previously described as holding more than 60 billion product listings that are continually refreshed with pricing and availability data. Items saved to the cart persist across sessions, so a shopper who adds a pair of shoes on a Tuesday and a blender on a Friday can return the following week and find both still there, along with any price drops or restock alerts Google has flagged in the meantime.

The cart is also tied to Google Wallet, which the company says lets it factor in credit-card perks when suggesting how to pay and surface relevant promo codes automatically. For checkout, Google said shoppers can complete a purchase with Google Pay in a few taps for a set of launch partners, among them Nike, Sephora, Target, Ulta Beauty, Walmart, Wayfair and what the company called "many Shopify merchants," or transfer the cart to a retailer's own site to finish there. Google was explicit that participating merchants remain the seller of record, responsible for order confirmations, returns and customer support.

The launch arrives alongside a separate feature Google calls "Let Google Call," which dispatches an AI agent to phone nearby stores and check whether an item is actually in stock before a shopper drives over, extending the company's shopping tools from the screen into the phone call.

A protocol built for machine-to-machine shopping

The checkout mechanics behind Universal Cart run on the Universal Commerce Protocol, an open standard Google introduced in January at the National Retail Federation's Big Show conference in New York. Google has described the protocol on its developer blog as a shared, secure way for consumer-facing surfaces such as Gemini and AI Mode to talk to merchants' backend systems without each retailer having to build a custom integration for every new AI shopping interface that comes along. Google says it co-developed the standard with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair and Target, and that more than 20 payments companies, including Visa, Mastercard and Stripe, have endorsed it.

Google has continued adding to the protocol through the year, including a March update that introduced optional multi-item cart and catalogue-linking capabilities beyond the original single-item checkout, and a broader set of merchant tools the company detailed around its Marketing Live event in May, where Universal Cart itself was first previewed.

A field littered with retreats

Google's rollout comes after a rival effort stumbled. OpenAI scaled back its Instant Checkout feature in ChatGPT in late March, months after launching it with Shopify merchants, following reports that only a small number of sellers, roughly a dozen out of Shopify's millions of merchants, had gone live with it during the test period. OpenAI said the initial version lacked the flexibility it wanted and said it would deprioritize Instant Checkout as a standalone feature, shifting focus instead to in-chat shopping apps and routing purchases to merchants' own sites. Amazon, for its part, has been building its own AI shopping assistant, Rufus, deeper into its app rather than opening its marketplace to outside agents.

That history has made retail-technology analysts cautious about how much traction any single company's cart can gain. Modern Retail, a trade publication, reported that Jason Grunberg, chief marketing officer at the fraud-prevention firm Forter, questioned which companies actually have consumers' trust to experiment with handing over more shopping control, asking what organizations have earned "the permission from consumers to experiment in this regard." Anthony Ferry, co-founder and chief executive of the retail consultancy Wayvia, told the same publication that getting merchants to sign on is the easy part compared with getting shoppers to actually use a tool like this instead of going straight to a brand's own site: "the retailers really have to come up with a compelling value proposition of why you need to come to my site," he said.

"In the age of agentic commerce, people will want to shop anywhere," said Suresh Ganapathy, Google's senior director of product management for consumer shopping, describing the company's aim as functioning as "a matchmaker, not a marketplace."

Who is affected

For now, the rollout is limited to Search's AI Mode and the Gemini app inside the United States. Google's announcement said the cart will extend to YouTube and Gmail as later destinations, and the company has separately said it is preparing a version of its checkout protocol for Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. Retailers who have signed on gain a direct line into Google's shopping surfaces without having to build a bespoke integration for each one, courtesy of the shared protocol, but they also cede a layer of the customer relationship to Google's interface rather than their own storefront, the trade-off several analysts flagged as the real test of the product.

Shoppers who use Search or Gemini for research will be able to opt into the feature simply by saving an item; Google has not described the cart as requiring a separate sign-up or subscription. The company has also not disclosed adoption figures, pricing arrangements with merchants, or a timeline for when "Let Google Call" and Universal Cart will reach other Google surfaces.

What happens next

Google is positioning the holiday shopping season, now roughly six weeks away, as the first real stress test of Universal Cart, framing the tool around use cases such as tracking gift prices and flagging restocks during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday rush. Whether the cart changes shopping habits will depend on whether consumers trust Google enough to let a search engine and chatbot manage purchases across competing retailers, and whether enough merchants beyond the initial launch partners decide that the convenience of plugging into Google's protocol outweighs losing some direct control over the checkout experience to a platform that, by its own description, intends to sit in the middle of nearly every online purchase.