Research, guides and ecosystem updates
Original research on UCP adoption, the State of Agentic Commerce report, guides for each store platform, and the latest spec changes, written for developers and platform teams building for agentic commerce.
UCP Webhooks: How Stores Tell Agents an Order Changed — and How to Verify It
Checkout is the beginning of an order, not the end. UCP webhooks are how a store tells an agent the order shipped, partially fulfilled, or got refunded — as a signed, current-state snapshot. The natural downstream of the agent profile: same `UCP-Agent` header, same `signing_keys`, same RFC 9421 signatures, pointed the other way.
· 9 min read
The UCP Agent Profile: How We Gave Our Shopping Agent a Verifiable Identity
Merchants have always been able to verify a store's UCP profile. Now the agent is verifiable too. Our platform profile at /.well-known/ucp-agent now conforms to the UCP profile schema — a `ucp` member, a `signing_keys` JWK set, and signed requests (RFC 9421) that let any merchant prove who's knocking.
· 7 min read
Introducing the UCP Playground Extension: An AI Shopping Agent in Your Side Panel
Our second extension turns any UCP-enabled store into a live agent demo. Open Chrome's side panel, pick a model, and watch (or drive) an AI shopping agent search, build a cart, and reach checkout — side by side with the page, using the store's own UCP tools. No screen-scraping, no leaving the tab.
· 7 min read
AI Commerce Needs MLPerf — and Here's an Early Attempt
Agentic commerce has consolidated around UCP, but there's no shared way to evaluate how well any of these implementations actually work for real frontier agents. Today we're publishing UCP Playground Evals — standardised sequences, cross-store comparability, multi-model coverage, and replayable sessions for every result.
· 12 min read
Introducing the UCP Score: A 0–100 Agent-Readiness Grade for Every UCP Store
The most common follow-up to a UCP status check has always been 'OK, but is it any good?' — so today we're shipping the answer: a 0–100 score with category breakdowns, copy-paste fixes, and platform-aware percentiles for any domain.
· 9 min read
Introducing Side-by-Side Store Compare: See How Any Two UCP Stores Stack Up
The most common follow-up to a UCP status report has always been 'OK, but how does that compare to [other store]?' — so we built the thing people were already trying to do in two browser tabs.
· 7 min read
3,000 UCP Stores, Open Data: Why We're Publishing Our Dataset on Hugging Face
We've been crawling UCP manifests since January. This week we crossed 3,000 verified merchants — and it's time to share the data. Monthly snapshots, CC-BY 4.0, free to use.
· 5 min read
The First Fully Autonomous AI Agent Purchase Through UCP
An AI agent searched a store, picked a product, linked a customer identity, selected wallet payment, set shipping, and completed checkout — creating a real WooCommerce order. No browser. No card network. No human after proceed.
· 5 min read
UCP Now Supports Identity Linking — What It Means for Agentic Commerce
The UCP spec now defines identity linking as a core capability, and the protocol just got a major redesign. Here's what it is, how OAuth 2.0 enables agents to authenticate as real buyers, and why it's the missing piece between agent browsing and agent commerce.
· 8 min read
How a Browser Extension Became Our Biggest Discovery Engine — And What We're Building Next
1,480 domains. 98.4% verified. A technical deep dive into how the UCP Checker Chrome extension works under the hood, what it discovered as the largest UCP manifest discovery channel, and the features we're considering next.
· 13 min read
Why We Built UCP Playground
We went from scanning manifests to building a full agent shopping playground. Six models, 1'000's of stores, 114 agent sessions — here is what happens when AI agents actually try to buy things.
· 10 min read