Protocol Glossary

The protocols and standards that power AI commerce, explained without jargon.

Commerce Protocols

UCPGoogle ecosystem

Universal Commerce Protocol

A protocol developed within the Google AI ecosystem that standardizes how AI agents discover products, check availability, and complete purchases. UCP defines a manifest format that stores publish so agents know what operations are supported.

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ACPOpenAI ecosystem

Agent Commerce Protocol

A protocol from the OpenAI ecosystem that defines how conversational AI agents interact with online stores. ACP covers product search, cart management, and checkout through structured API endpoints that agents like ChatGPT and Operator can call.

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MCPAnthropic ecosystem

Model Context Protocol

A protocol from Anthropic that defines how AI models connect to external tools and data sources. In commerce, MCP lets agents like Claude use store-specific tools for browsing products, managing carts, and completing purchases through a standardized interface.

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WebMCPW3C ecosystem

Web Model Context Protocol

W3C specification for exposing web application capabilities to AI agents via HTML form elements. Enables browser-based agents to discover and interact with site functionality. Chrome 146+.

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A2AGoogle ecosystem

Agent-to-Agent Protocol

Google's Agent-to-Agent protocol for multi-agent collaboration and task delegation. Enables AI agents to coordinate complex purchasing flows across services.

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Foundational Standards

JSON-LD

JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data

A structured data format embedded in web pages that describes products, prices, availability, and reviews in a way machines can read. Search engines and AI agents use JSON-LD to understand what a store sells without scraping the page visually.

Product schema with name, price, availability, and review ratings.

robots.txt

Robots Exclusion Protocol

A text file at the root of a website that tells crawlers and AI agents which pages they can and cannot access. For agentic commerce, a well-configured robots.txt grants access to product pages and API endpoints while protecting admin areas.

Allow: /products/ Disallow: /admin/

Sitemap

XML Sitemap

An index file that lists all the pages on a site, helping AI agents and search engines discover every product page efficiently. Without a sitemap, agents may miss products that are not linked prominently on the site.

sitemap.xml listing all product URLs with last-modified dates.

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