Google launches Universal Cart in the US to track shopping across Search and Gemini

Google has launched Universal Cart in the United States, a shopping tool that lets users save and track products they come across in Search and in the Gemini app. According to TechCrunch, the feature, first previewed at Google I/O in May, is now available to US users.

What Universal Cart does

The core pitch is persistence. A shopper who spots something interesting can add it to the cart and move on; when they return later, their items and shopping progress are still there, so there is no need to hunt down the same product twice. Because the cart can pull in items from multiple retailers, TechCrunch describes it as a central hub for browsing and keeping an eye on potential purchases, rather than a basket tied to a single store.

Google also frames the cart as a monitoring service. It can send notifications when the price of a saved item falls or when an out-of-stock product becomes available again.

Payments, perks and checkout

Beyond collecting products, the tool is designed to help further along in the purchase. TechCrunch reports that Universal Cart can take credit card perks into account when helping a user decide how to pay, and can surface relevant promo codes.

Checkout itself runs through Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, or UCP, an open standard the company introduced earlier this year. UCP is intended to let AI agents and retailers work together across different stages of the shopping journey, including checkout — effectively the plumbing connecting a saved cart item to a completed transaction.

Part of Google's wider shopping push

Universal Cart is the latest piece in a broader AI shopping effort by the company. TechCrunch points to existing features such as conversational product discovery in Search's AI Mode and "Let Google Call," which uses an AI agent to contact nearby stores and check whether an item is in stock.

Google is not alone in this space. Amazon, OpenAI and other rivals have been adding agentic commerce features as companies look for ways to make chatbots useful beyond answering questions.

Why it matters

Universal Cart marks a shift in Google's role: from pointing users toward retailer websites to hosting the shopping session itself. If a single Google-hosted cart becomes the place where people collect items from many stores, Google gains an influential position between shoppers and retailers, with visibility into intent, prices and availability before any purchase happens.

The UCP connection matters as well. By anchoring checkout to an open standard for agent-to-retailer coordination, Google is trying to set the technical groundwork for agentic commerce rather than simply shipping one feature. Much will depend on retailer adoption and on whether shoppers are comfortable routing their entire purchase pipeline through one company, but the launch signals that Google intends to compete across the full shopping journey, not just the search box.