Walmart, Amazon, Google test shopping agents

Shopping sites are being rebuilt for software that buys things, not just people who click links. Google, Walmart, Amazon and OpenAI have all moved pieces into place since early 2025. (blog.google) (corporate.walmart.com) (aboutamazon.com) (openai.com) Google announced the Universal Commerce Protocol on January 11, 2026, as an open standard for “agentic commerce” across discovery, checkout and post-purchase support. Walmart was listed as a co-developer alongside Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair and Target. (blog.google) (developers.googleblog.com) Google said UCP will soon power a checkout feature on eligible U.S. retailer listings in AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app. Those purchases will run through Google Pay, with PayPal support “soon,” using shipping information saved in Google Wallet. (blog.google) Walmart had already been pushing the same direction. On June 6, 2025, it rolled out its Sparky shopping assistant across categories in the Walmart app and said the tool would expand into reordering and service booking. (corporate.walmart.com) Amazon took a different route on April 3, 2025, when it began testing “Buy for Me” with a subset of users. If Amazon does not sell an item, the feature can show products from other websites and let users request a purchase without leaving the Amazon Shopping app. (techcrunch.com) According to Amazon’s description of the feature, the agent visits the outside retailer’s site, selects the product, and fills in the shopper’s name, shipping address and payment details. TechCrunch reported Amazon said the system uses Amazon Nova models and Anthropic’s Claude, and that Amazon cannot see orders placed outside its platform. (techcrunch.com) The plumbing matters because older retail systems were built for one website or app at a time. Google said UCP is meant to remove the “N x N integration bottleneck,” where each merchant has to build separate connections for every assistant, search surface and payment provider. (developers.googleblog.com) OpenAI is building the discovery layer around that same shift. Its crawler documentation now lists OAI-AdsBot, a user agent that visits only pages submitted as ads in ChatGPT to check safety and to use landing-page content in deciding when an ad is relevant. (openai.com) OpenAI’s ad test began in the United States on February 9, 2026, and may show a single ad unit below responses for Free and Go users in the U.S., Australia, New Zealand and Canada. OpenAI said ads do not influence answers and are ranked on separate systems. (help.openai.com) OpenAI’s crawler page also draws a sharper line between bots. OAI-SearchBot is for search visibility, GPTBot is for foundation-model training, ChatGPT-User handles user-triggered visits, and OAI-AdsBot is for ad validation and relevance. (openai.com) That leaves merchants with two audiences to satisfy at once: human shoppers reading pages and automated agents parsing inventory, price, checkout and policy details. The stores that are easiest for software to understand are increasingly the stores these systems can actually use. (developers.googleblog.com) (openai.com)