The Universal Commerce Protocol defines capabilities for agents to shop: discovery at /.well-known/ucp, checkout, orders, and extensions such as AP2 mandates. It is moving quickly, with lodging booking and a common ask capability merged in 2026 and food checkout under review.
Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)
The Universal Commerce Protocol defines capabilities for agents to shop: discovery at /.well-known/ucp, checkout, orders, and extensions such as AP2 mandates. It is moving quickly, with lodging booking and a common ask capability merged in 2026 and food checkout under review.
Where it stands
As of 2026-10-27, the Agentic Standards Map records:
Latest GitHub release v2026-08-25 (2026-08-25); lodging booking draft merged 2026-09-24 (PR #780); the Common capability
askmerged 2026-10-07 (PR #538); feed and subscription policy in draft (PR #866, PR #890); the food checkout proposal (PR #897) is under review (open on 2026-10-13). On 2026-10-13 main is at commit 9756aa9 (2026-10-12) and no release is listed after v2026-08-25. …
Why it matters to agents
The AP2 mandates extension says businesses must “embed a cryptographic signature in checkout responses, proving the terms (price, line items) are authentic” and platforms provide mandates “proving the user explicitly authorized the specific checkout state and funds transfer”. The Order page calls the entity “the authoritative latest state of the order at the time of retrieval or delivery”, where webhook payloads “be signed by the business and verified by the platform”. …
Sources
- https://github.com/Universal-Commerce-Protocol/ucp/pull/780
- https://github.com/Universal-Commerce-Protocol/ucp/blob/f2206e680f64fe2cc73495acc3557569afd9097a/docs/specification/payment/extensions/ap2-mandates.md
- https://github.com/Universal-Commerce-Protocol/ucp/blob/f2206e680f64fe2cc73495acc3557569afd9097a/docs/specification/shopping/order/index.md
- https://github.com/Universal-Commerce-Protocol/ucp/issues/682
- https://github.com/Universal-Commerce-Protocol/ucp/blob/f2206e680f64fe2cc73495acc3557569afd9097a/docs/specification/overview/index.md
- https://github.com/Universal-Commerce-Protocol/ucp/issues/904
Status and relevance quoted, shortened, from the Agentic Standards Map by Francesco Marinoni Moretto, CC BY 4.0, https://frmoretto.github.io/agentic-standards-map/. The full entry, with every dated source, is in map.json under ucp.
Industry: payments
Related standards
Standards this one builds on, supersedes, profiles or is commonly deployed beside.
