Google I/O spent a week covering how AI will transform the search experience. Most of it focused on consumer features, while less attention was paid to a pattern emerging for enterprises.
Many of the most prominent consumer demos at I/O take the user from search to action, with Google taking on more of the journey in between. While this was a recurring theme throughout I/O, the infrastructure behind these demos was already in place months before the keynote.
Last week’s deep dive argued that the real risk from I/O was more economic than technical. This article examines where this economic risk is concentrated and why the business playbook doesn’t match the consumer experience that Google has shown on stage.
What Google showed
Google’s I/O demos included Universal Cart, agent booking for local services, and information agents that monitor listings or products in the background.
Universal Cart lets you add products to a single cart that persists across all Google surfaces. Agent booking brings together pricing and availability and provides links to complete the booking, bringing the trip closer to completion.
However, not every demo was commercial. Google also showed off coding, dashboards, simulations and research tools.
The infrastructure was already moving
I/O made the infrastructure visible to consumers, but it had been in development for a long time.
In late 2025, Google introduced Agentic Checkout, which allows Google’s AI to add items to a merchant’s shopping cart and complete purchases.
This year, Google introduced the Universal Commerce Protocol, an open standard for agent commerce. UCP provides agents and merchant systems with a common language rather than requiring unique connections for each agent.
In April, Sundar Pichai told Stripe CEO Patrick Collison that Search would become an “agent manager.” SEJ has been tracking this shift since the beginning of the year using Google’s agent search patents and task-based search capabilities.
Jay Jaffin, CMO & Strategic Advisor at Visor Strategic Advisors, summarized companies’ concerns:
“Universal Cart doesn’t just colonize the bottom of the funnel. It colonizes the whole thing, from the first search query to the last checkout, without your customer ever landing on your site. The customization window this time can be much shorter than a decade.”
The user these demos were created for
After watching the I/O demos, it became clear that these features are aimed at a specific type of user. This user doesn’t open ten tabs and compare options manually. They describe what they want and let the AI do the rest.
When they ask information agents to monitor housing listings or track sneaker drops, they’re not looking in the traditional sense. You delegate a research task and wait for a notification.
This means that companies are competing for something else. Haroon Qureshi, Global Retail Experience & Partnerships Lead at WPP Media, describes how the goals have changed and explains:
“Will brands compete for clicks in the future? Or for being recommended?”
At I/O, Google said AI Mode had reached one billion monthly users, with requests more than doubling every quarter since launch. As a result, this new type of search achieves a reach that only a few interfaces can match.
Why this matters for search professionals
E-commerce
Google ensures that your brand remains the registered dealer with UCP. Shoppers can pay with Google Pay or transfer items directly to your business’s website.
However, marketers are starting to differentiate between owning the purchase and owning the data that led to it.
Armando Roggio, Senior Contributor at Practical Ecommerce, puts it this way:
“In the Google model, merchants still own the transaction, but not the purchase intent or product discovery.”
This makes it harder to solve the optimization problem without data from Google about how different signals are weighted in agent-mediated flows.
Aleyda Solís, SEO consultant and founder of Orainti, noted on LinkedIn that “ecommerce SEO and AI search optimization cannot be reduced to ‘content around products’.”
In her post, she described the important signals such as accurate feeds, consistent attributes, clear pricing and detailed content that give agents reason to think.
Local businesses and service providers
For local businesses, search matches prices and availability with direct links to complete the booking through the provider of their choice. In select categories like home repairs, beauty care, and pet care, users can ask Google to call businesses on their behalf.
If the call goes to voicemail or employees can’t provide clear answers, the company may lose the moment before the user even visits a website.
In a way, agent booking makes preparedness a visibility factor. Karim Al Chamaa, founder of Implemnt, described the dynamic on his company’s blog as follows:
“If the Google agent calls, disorganization will automatically result in disqualification.”
measurement
When an information agent monitors housing listings for a week and returns a recommendation, the value has been extracted without a traditional click path.
Mentions co-founder Jake Ward wrote on X: “We continue to move into a world of visibility > clicks.” You can track organic sessions and referral clicks, but you can’t track the number of times your company’s products have been considered and rejected by an agent, or the number of times your company has been recommended in an agent booking flow.
The metrics that have explained search performance for years may not so clearly explain these agent-brokered trips.
What is not yet known
Google has not shared the selection criteria for Universal Cart recommendations or travel agent booking results. Marketers are currently developing strategies based on conclusions rather than official guidelines. Until Google makes it clear which signals its agents rely on when comparing and selecting, the optimization process will remain a matter of careful guesswork.
There are currently no third-party measurement tools that track agent-initiated transactions or the frequency with which recommendations are made as separate metrics from organic traffic.
While Merchant Center now offers AI-driven insights that compare share of voice with similar brands, businesses can’t tell whether “the agent never considered us” or “the agent considered and rejected us.”
The connection between paid ads and organic visibility in AI-driven commerce is also not fully understood. Google mentions that it is “not a retailer” and “not a marketplace,” but Universal Cart brings together products from different retailers and offers AI commentary that suggests alternatives. How advertising will be integrated into this experience is a question Google hasn’t answered.
Looking ahead
Google makes it faster for consumers to move from search to action, but at the same time makes it harder for companies to recognize and measure their visibility. The buying experience shared at I/O was presented from the consumer side, with few details provided that could help companies feature in it.
The feedback loop is becoming increasingly difficult to track. If a consumer leaves the purchasing decision to an intermediary, the companies that are not selected may never know that they are even part of the process.
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Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock
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