Glossary
What are Agentic Commerce Protocols?
Definition
Agentic commerce protocols are the competing standards that decide how AI agents find products, prove who they are, check out and pay on someone’s behalf. There are roughly nine of them, backed by OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, Klarna, Meta and others. They overlap, none has won, and most big platforms are backing several at once.
Also called: agentic commerce standards, agent payment protocols, AI shopping protocols
At a glance
- CategoriesCommerce
- Related fieldsCommerce, Technical
- DifficultyIntermediate
At a glance
- No single standard covers a whole purchase. Each one started from a different part of the problem.
- They compete where they overlap, mainly on product data, checkout and agent identity.
- Most brands won’t implement any of them directly. Commerce platforms, payment providers and the card networks are building support in.
- What a brand controls is the data every protocol carries: products, prices, stock and policies.
The nine standards side by side
| Protocol | Backed by | What it mainly handles | First announced |
|---|---|---|---|
| ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol) | OpenAI and Stripe | Product discovery inside ChatGPT. Started as checkout. | September 2025 |
| UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol) | Google, co-developed with Shopify and large retailers | Discovery through checkout across Google surfaces | January 2026 |
| MCP (Model Context Protocol) | Anthropic, now the Agentic AI Foundation | Connecting agents to tools and data, including catalogs | November 2024 |
| AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol) | Google, now the FIDO Alliance | Proving the shopper approved the payment | September 2025 |
| MPP (Machine Payments Protocol) | Stripe and Tempo | Agents paying services directly, per request | March 2026 |
| Visa Trusted Agent Protocol | Visa, built with Cloudflare | Verifying an agent is legitimate | October 2025 |
| Mastercard Agent Pay | Mastercard | Agent payments on Mastercard rails | April 2025 |
| Agentic Product Protocol | Klarna | A shared product catalog agents can search | December 2025 |
| Personal Agent Protocol | Sierra and Meta | How a personal agent signs in to a business and what it’s allowed to do | October 2026 |
Where they compete
- Product data: ACP, UCP and Klarna’s protocol all want to be the format agents read your catalog in.
- Checkout: UCP handles it end to end. ACP did too, until OpenAI moved most ChatGPT purchases back to merchants’ own checkouts in March 2026.
- Agent identity: Visa, Mastercard and the Personal Agent Protocol each have an answer to “who is this agent and what can it do.”
- Payments: AP2, MPP and the card network schemes each cover a piece. Several are designed to plug into each other.
The question to ask instead
“Which protocol do we need?” is usually the wrong question. Every one of these moves the same data: product names, prices, stock, shipping and returns. If that data is wrong or thin, no protocol fixes it, and structured catalog data leaves an agent far less to guess than whatever it scrapes from your pages. We break this down in the agentic commerce feed stack.
What to do now
- Ask your commerce platform and payment provider which of these they support, and what you need to switch on.
- Clean up your product feed. That’s the part only you can do.
- Check whether your bot protection blocks legitimate shopping agents.
- Pick one channel and get one product line working end to end before expanding.
Parsnipp Agentic Commerce scores how ready your catalog is for agents, whichever protocol they arrive through.
Further reading: The agentic commerce feed stack and agentic commerce, and what it can actually do right now.
How this term is used
There’s no agreed name for this group yet. Agentic commerce protocols, agent payment protocols and AI shopping protocols all get used for the same list, and the list keeps growing. We update this page as standards launch, merge or change jobs.
Agentic commerce is early, and its terms and standards are still forming. It’s the commerce branch of AI search marketing, built on organic GEO / AEO visibility.
Frequently asked questions
-
Which protocol will win?
Nobody knows yet. The companies closest to it, like Stripe and Shopify, are backing several at once. Expect consolidation over the next couple of years.
-
Do I need to build anything?
Usually not. Platforms and payment providers are building support in, often for several protocols through one integration. Your job is the data and the business rules, starting with your product feed.