• by Laurie Sullivan , Yesterday

Google introduced agentic commerce updates on Wednesday at Rethink ROI, including new structured conversational attributes and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven interactive video ads on YouTube to help retailers optimize their product feeds.

The "AI Performance Insights" dashboard and an open-standard "Universal Cart" allow merchants to track their share of mentions while enabling consumers to shop across Search, YouTube and Gmail.

“This will be a long holiday season for retailers,” Udayan Bose, founder and CEO of NetElixir, a global retail marketing and analytics agency, told MediaPost after attending the summit. “It will not be just one shopping season, but three.”

NetElixir, which forecasts 9% year-over-year growth in U.S. holiday ecommerce sales, estimated this holiday will unfold across three distinct shopping seasons, each shaped by a different mission and level of competitive intensity.

“If you exclude Amazon, Walmart, and TikTok Shop sales, the remainder of the U.S. economy was pretty flat in the first half of the year,” he said.

Bose said AI is compressing the timeline for consumers to make decisions faster, and adding to pre-intent discovery of products and services. He adds that “once intent is built, decisions come quickly.”

Google’s summit highlighted how retailers can strengthen their product feeds to capture more sales, with tips like submitting conversational and video attributes, and connecting loyalty member data to serve relevant perks and member pricing in AI-powered shopping.

Ashish Gupta, vice president and general manager of merchant shopping at Google, highlighted ways for retailers to succeed in agentic commerce. He wrote in a post that businesses need to learn how customers discover them through conversational experiences.

Now available in Merchant Center to businesses in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, and the U.S., "AI Performance Insights" gives retailers a clear view of how their brand and products are discovered, comparing the brand’s share of voice with others across platforms such as AI Mode and AI Overviews.

Updates in agentic commerce include new structured data “conversational attributes” in Merchant Center.

Rather than relying on static tags, retailers can now feed the AI answers to common product questions, compatible accessories and potential substitutes.

Eligible U.S. retailers also can embed conversational AI agents into YouTube video ads.

Google is scaling its open standard framework to support an intelligent, cross-platform “Universal Cart” and “Universal Commerce Protocol.” This allows users to add items while browsing Search, YouTube, or Gmail and check out using Google Pay or integrated partners including Klarna and Affirm.

YouTube video viewers dan ask complex questions and research products without leaving the video stream, with new conversational experiences in YouTube ads and simplified UCP integration capabilities.

Retailers can track product visibility inside AI Overviews and receive concrete feed recommendations to capture conversational traffic.