Google launched Universal Cart, a shopping cart powered by Gemini that works across merchants, across Search, YouTube, Gmail, and Gemini.
A customer adds a product while watching a YouTube video. Adds another while browsing Search. The cart tracks price history, finds deals, alerts to restocks, and handles checkout across multiple merchants in one place.
The infrastructure behind it is called the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). And Google confirmed it is expanding to Australia in coming months.
I want to be direct about what this means. Google is building itself into the middle of every online transaction.
The customer discovers, compares, and buys without ever visiting your website.
Your Shopify store, your WooCommerce site, your custom e-commerce build – they become fulfilment backends while Google owns the customer relationship.
That sounds alarming.
And for businesses that are going to do nothing… it should be!
But for businesses that integrate early, it is an opportunity.
You get a buy-now button inside AI Mode, YouTube, and Search. Your products become purchasable in the moment of discovery, not after a customer clicks through, loads your site, creates an account, and goes through checkout. The friction drops dramatically.
Google is rolling out Personal Intelligence globally – 200 countries, 98 languages, no subscription required.
You connect your Gmail, Google Photos, and soon Calendar to AI Mode.
Then you can ask things like
“what was that hotel I stayed at in Melbourne?”
or
“what did I order from that skincare brand last month?”
and Google searches your personal data to find it.
From a marketing perspective, this is subtle but important.
Traditional retargeting is built on the assumption that people forget. They visit your site, leave, and you need to remind them through display ads, remarketing lists, and email sequences.
But if a customer can just ask Google “what was that thing I was looking at?” and Google pulls it from their email receipts and browsing history, the retargeting function partially moves to Google. The user does not need to see your remarketing ad. They do not need to remember your brand name. They ask their AI assistant and it finds you.
This does not mean remarketing is dead.
We still see strong performance from first-party remarketing lists, Customer Match, and server-side tracking. But it does mean the landscape is shifting. Your transactional emails, your order confirmations, your receipts – these become discoverable content that Google can surface to bring a customer back. Making sure your email communications are clear, well-structured, and contain proper product information matters more than it used to.