Google's Universal Cart shopping tool launches in the US

Google said Thursday that Universal Cart, a tool that lets users collect and monitor products they find across Search and the Gemini app, is now available to U.S. users. The company first previewed the tool at Google I/O in May.

The idea is to make online shopping easier to track: find an item, save it to the cart, and return later to find the shopping progress still there, without having to hunt down the same products or start over. Universal Cart can pull items from multiple retailers, functioning as a central hub for browsing and tracking potential purchases. Google says the cart can also help shoppers stay on top of deals and availability, sending notifications when a saved product’s price drops or when an out-of-stock item becomes available again.

The tool is also designed to offer more tailored help during the shopping process: Google says it can factor in a user’s credit-card perks when helping them choose how to pay, and surface relevant promo codes. Checkout runs through Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol, or UCP, an open standard the company introduced earlier this year that is meant to help AI agents and retailers work together across the shopping journey, including checkout.

Universal Cart is Google’s latest push into AI-powered shopping, joining features such as conversational product discovery in Search’s AI Mode and “Let Google Call,” an AI agent that contacts nearby stores to check whether an item is in stock. Google isn’t alone in the push: Amazon, OpenAI, and other rivals have added agentic commerce features as companies look for ways to make chatbots useful beyond answering questions.

Why it matters

Universal Cart cements shopping as a core layer of Google’s AI push, tying Search and Gemini into a single commerce flow built on UCP, the open protocol Google wants AI agents and retailers to adopt. That puts Google in more direct competition with Amazon’s and OpenAI’s own agentic-shopping efforts.