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Agentic commerce standards, compared and tracked

A neutral, up-to-date reference for the protocols that let AI agents buy, pay and act. One filterable comparison, a dated adoption tracker, and primary sources on every page.

Compare the standardsRead the analysis

In short: "agentic commerce" is online commerce where AI agents discover, decide and, where a merchant supports it, help complete purchases on a person's behalf. It is not built on one protocol, or even one fixed list.

ACP and UCP address commerce journeys; AP2 addresses payment authorization; MCP and A2A connect tools and agents; x402 and MPP carry machine payments; Visa TAP and Mastercard Agent Pay add trust and network services.

Start with the decision

What are you trying to establish?

Four paths into the same source-linked registry.

01Choose a protocol layerCompare scope, governance, transport, payment role and documented adoption.02Prepare a merchant stackStart from documented platform surfaces, test cases and operational limits.03Check an adoption claimInspect the organization, dated role and primary source behind each record.04Inspect technical evidenceFind specifications, machine-readable artifacts, TCKs and validators.

Protocol directory

Five systems to orient the map

View all 9 tracked systems
ACPBetaAgentic Commerce ProtocolOpenAI and StripeAgent commerce protocol behind product discovery in ChatGPT, after powering Instant Checkout. OpenAI + Stripe, Apache 2.0.verified 2026-09-01UCPBetaUniversal Commerce ProtocolGoogle and Shopify (with Etsy, Wayfair, Target, Walmart)Full-journey commerce standard announced for agentic checkout on Google AI Mode and Gemini. Google + Shopify, Apache 2.0.verified 2026-08-30AP2FoundationAgent Payments ProtocolCreated by Google; donated to the FIDO AlliancePayment-agnostic framework for agent-led payments. Created by Google and now governed by the FIDO Alliance; extends A2A and MCP.verified 2026-09-01MCPStableModel Context ProtocolCreated by Anthropic; named as a founding technical contribution to the Agentic AI Foundation (Linux Foundation)The context layer connecting agents to tools and data. Anthropic, now a Linux Foundation project.verified 2026-09-01x402Stablex402Created by Coinbase; specification stewarded by the x402 FoundationHTTP-native stablecoin payments for agents and APIs. Coinbase, built on the 402 status code.verified 2026-09-01

The complete tracker also covers Visa TAP, Mastercard Agent Pay, A2A and MPP. Some systems overlap, most solve different layers.

Editorial desk

Latest source-led analysis

Browse all analysis

Featured analysis

One Merchant in Four Is Closed to Identified Robots

24% of French and US merchant homepages answer HTTP 403 to a robot that identifies itself. Counting timeouts and errors, a quarter to a third of the 500 most visited stores are closed to it.

Read the analysis
UCP Adoption Is a Platform Effect: 500 Merchants Measured64 of 500 merchants publish a valid UCP profile and 58 of them sit on Shopify. What the readiness barometer shows about who really adopts UCP, and what a merchant should do with it.7 Production Gates for Commerce AgentsA practical test for commerce agents: trusted data, permissions, approvals, payment handoff, evals, latency and recourse.

Evidence desk

Follow the record, not the announcement cycle

Every material status is dated and linked. A documented announcement is not presented as a deployment, certification or market-share measurement.

Open the evidence registryRead the methodology
Recent milestonesFull changelog
  1. UCP release v2026-08-25 expands beyond retail checkoutSource
  2. Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Payments becomes generally availableSource
  3. MCP publishes its stateless 2026-07-28 specificationSource

Open the readiness barometer: 500 merchants scanned · Browse dated statistics