PayPal has announced that it started to support Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard facilitating interoperable commerce experiences for AI checkout.
By launching this initiative, PayPal intends to make its services available as a payment option within a new checkout experience on Google, enabled by UCP.
Google’s UCP
The move comes amid a shift in consumer shopping behaviour, with AI agents now helping individuals discover, compare, and decide what to buy. To drive this change and support consumers, commerce infrastructure needs to be open, secure, and interoperable.
PayPal’s announcement follows the recent rollout of UCP, with Google working with Ant International to grow AI capabilities. With its Universal Commerce Protocol, Google aims to allow merchants to make their products discoverable and purchasable within AI-enabled experiences, including Google Search and the Gemini app.
Additionally, UCP sought to serve as the backbone of a new Google checkout capabilities, set to allow consumers to make purchases in AI Mode in the browser search and in the Gemini app. Google aimed to make UCP open and platform agnostic, thus supporting any credential provider as well.
Bringing interoperability into commerce
Talking about the collaboration with Google, Michelle Gill, GM of Small Business and Financial Services at PayPal, mentioned that the strategic initiative reflects the company’s role in delivering a trusted payments experience layer that brings agentic commerce to consumers.
When it comes to merchants, fragmentation across platforms represents one of the most significant issues. PayPal focuses on mitigating this complexity by serving as an infrastructure layer, linking consumers and merchants through reliable payments, fraud safeguarding, and buyer and seller protections. Prakhar Mehrotra, Senior Vice President and Head of AI at PayPal, added that interoperability enables retailers to connect once and reach several environments while also maintaining high levels of transparency and control.
Furthermore, PayPal’s partnership with Google on UCP underlines the company’s commitment to making commerce open, trusted, and created together, centred on not controlling interfaces, but on allowing the ecosystem to function optimally.
