Google Adds In-Chat Purchases to Gemini and AI Mode: How Brands Stay Visible

Introduction: The search bar is now a shopping cart

Google is fundamentally transforming search by integrating direct purchasing into its Gemini and AI Mode interfaces. What used to be a multi-step journey across search results, product pages, and checkout flows is being compressed into a single, conversational interaction.

This new paradigm, often called agentic commerce, means AI assistants are no longer just answering questions. They are completing tasks and executing transactions on behalf of users, like a personal shopper, researcher, and purchasing agent rolled into one. For brands, the implication is clear: you must become visible, recommended, and purchasable directly inside AI chat experiences.

This article breaks down Google's new commerce features, what they mean for marketers, and a practical three-step framework to stay visible and win in this new agentic era of commerce.

What are Google's new in-chat commerce features?

Google is evolving its AI from an information engine into a transactional agent by integrating an open standard called the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). UCP allows users to complete purchases directly within a chat conversation, using the payment and shipping details already stored in Google Pay or Wallet.

How Gemini is evolving from an answer engine to a shopping agent

The evolution from AI Overviews providing information to Gemini facilitating transactions is a structural shift. This is the dawn of agentic shopping, where AI agents can handle multi-step tasks end to end: researching options, comparing tradeoffs, and completing the purchase without the user ever leaving the chat interface.

Imagine asking Gemini for the best running shoes for flat feet and half-marathon training. Instead of sending you to a list of links, Gemini can research options across retailers, narrow them down based on your criteria, and present a recommended product with a Buy button. With one confirmation, the order is placed using your saved payment and shipping details.

In this workflow, the AI controls the path from intent to conversion. The experience that used to be owned by websites and ecommerce platforms is being pulled into a single, AI-orchestrated conversation.

What is the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)?

The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is a new open standard co-developed by Google and major industry players including Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart. Its goal is to create a common language that lets AI agents and merchants communicate seamlessly about products, pricing, and fulfillment.

For users, the experience is simple: they research a product in Gemini, see a Buy option directly in the chat, and complete the purchase in a couple of taps. Behind the scenes, UCP ensures the AI can correctly interpret product attributes, availability, and transaction rules from different merchants and route the order accordingly.

This removes friction from the buying journey and makes the AI's recommendation instantly transactable. If your products are not represented in a way that UCP-powered systems can understand, you risk being invisible in this new layer of commerce.

Why do in-chat purchases change the marketing playbook?

AI-driven commerce compresses and reshapes the traditional marketing funnel. Instead of a linear path from awareness to consideration to conversion, users can now jump directly from intent to purchase based on a single AI recommendation. The first answer is often the final decision.

How does the funnel change from zero-click to zero-consideration?

For years, marketers have grappled with zero-click searches, where users find what they need directly on the search results page and never visit a website. Agentic commerce introduces an even more disruptive concept: zero-consideration purchases.

If a competitor is the AI's first and only purchasable recommendation, your brand may never enter the customer's consideration set at all. The decision is made inside the answer before a click, a comparison, or a retargeting campaign has a chance to influence it.

The goal is no longer just to rank number one to earn a click. It is to become the AI's chosen solution at the exact moment of intent, so you win the sale inside the chat itself.

Why are traditional SEO metrics no longer enough?

In conversational interfaces, the most important interactions happen before a website load or a click is recorded. Metrics like keyword rankings, CTR, and organic traffic tell you how well you drive users to your site, but they say nothing about what happens inside the AI's answer box.

To operate effectively in this environment, marketers need a new measurement model focused on AI Engine Optimization (AEO): how often you appear in answers, how you are framed, and which sources the AI relies on to talk about your brand.

How can brands optimize for conversational commerce?

Winning in conversational commerce requires more than one-off technical fixes. Brands need an integrated strategy that makes their products easy for AI agents to understand, establishes them as trusted authorities, and plugs them into Google's emerging commerce tooling.

A practical way to approach this is with a three-step framework: fortify your technical foundation for AI readability, build brand authority to earn AI trust, and actively engage with Google's new conversational commerce products.

Step 1: Make your products machine-readable and transaction-ready

Before an AI can recommend your product, it has to understand it. Making your products and content machine-readable is the foundational step for visibility in agentic commerce.

• Implement structured data: Use Schema.org markup for products, pricing, reviews, and availability. This gives AI agents a clear, structured understanding of your catalog and how each SKU maps to user needs.
• Optimize product feeds: Enrich your Google Merchant Center feeds with conversational attributes. Go beyond keywords to include FAQs, use cases, compatible accessories, and potential substitutes so AI can match your products to specific intents.
• Ensure technical accessibility: Configure your robots.txt to allow essential AI crawlers such as GoogleOther to access your content. Maintain a fast, crawlable site architecture so AI systems can parse and refresh your information efficiently.

Step 2: Build brand authority to earn AI trust

AI models are designed to favor authoritative, trustworthy sources. Your content strategy must shift from simply ranking for keywords to demonstrating real-world experience, expertise, and reliability that AI systems can recognize and rely on.

• Prioritize E-E-A-T: Create content that clearly signals Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Showcase real practitioners, customer outcomes, and transparent product claims.
• Earn third-party citations: Secure mentions, reviews, and recommendations in reputable publications, industry communities, and high-authority review sites. AI agents lean heavily on these external signals when deciding which brands to highlight.
• Answer questions directly: Structure your content with clear, conversational answers to common prompts. Use FAQs, how-tos, and comparison guides that map closely to the way people ask questions in Gemini and other AI assistants.

Step 3: Adopt Google's new conversational commerce tools

Google is introducing new tools designed to help brands participate directly in these emerging experiences. Early adopters can secure a meaningful edge in visibility and conversion.

• Explore Business Agent: Rolling out with retailers like Lowe's and Reebok, Business Agent lets you deploy a branded, AI-powered virtual sales associate directly on Search. It can answer product questions in your brand's voice and guide shoppers through complex decisions.
• Pilot Direct Offers: Direct Offers is a Google Ads feature that surfaces exclusive discounts and promotions directly in AI Mode when users show high purchase intent. Think targeted incentives such as a 20 percent discount presented at the exact moment a shopper is ready to buy.

How to measure performance in AI-powered search

To manage AI as a channel, marketers need measurement that goes beyond traditional SEO. You must be able to see when and how your brand appears in AI answers, how those answers are framed, and which sources are influencing them.

What new KPIs should marketers track for AI search?

To prove ROI and optimize performance, marketing leaders should integrate AI-centric KPIs into their dashboards and reporting, focusing on what happens inside the answer rather than only on the resulting clicks.

• Visibility and position: How often is your brand mentioned in answers to high-value, purchase-intent prompts? When you appear, are you the first, second, or third recommendation compared to competitors?
• Sentiment and framing: How does the AI describe your brand and products? Is the tone positive, neutral, or negative? Does the answer highlight the differentiators you want to be known for?
• Source attribution: Which third-party articles, reviews, and communities are being cited or drawn upon when the AI talks about your brand? Identifying these sources is critical to influencing them.

How to turn AI search into a measurable growth channel

Without specialized analytics, optimizing for AI search is guesswork. With the right data, you can transform it into a predictable, reportable growth channel similar to organic search in prior eras.

By systematically tracking visibility, sentiment, and source attribution across prompts and engines, you can benchmark your performance against competitors, identify the queries that drive the most valuable mentions, and build a repeatable strategy for winning recommendations and driving agentic sales.

The agentic era of commerce is here

The ability to buy directly within an AI chat is not a distant future concept. It is a present reality that is already reshaping how consumers discover, evaluate, and purchase products. Brands that treat this as a marginal experiment risk becoming invisible where the next generation of decisions is made.

The companies that move now to make their products machine-readable, build unimpeachable authority, and measure their performance in AI answers will secure a defensible advantage. Those who wait may find that, in the AI-powered storefront, they have been quietly replaced by competitors the algorithms already know and trust.

FAQs