# Checkout came first. Loyalty is next on the UCP roadmap > The Universal Commerce Protocol already lets shoppers buy inside Gemini and AI Mode. Its roadmap now turns to loyalty and member benefits, and that changes who wins the AI channel. By [Yotam Gabi](https://bazak.ai/writing/authors/yotam-gabi), Co-founder & CEO · Published 2026-10-16 · Agentic commerce, Travel, E-commerce For the first year of AI shopping, the hand-off was the weak point. A shopper found a product or a hotel inside an assistant, clicked, and landed on a website to start the purchase again. The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) was built to remove that step. Its roadmap shows where it goes next: loyalty. That matters more than it sounds. Checkout decides whether a sale can happen inside the AI. Loyalty decides whose sale it is. ## Where UCP is today Google and Shopify launched UCP in January 2026 as an open standard for AI agents to "connect and transact with any merchant." Etsy, Target, Walmart and Wayfair co-developed it, and payment and commerce players from Stripe to Visa and Mastercard endorsed it. The specification is public and Apache-licensed, and it works alongside MCP and Google's agent-to-agent protocol, A2A. The first release covers four building blocks: - **Checkout:** carts, totals and taxes, completed inside the conversation - **Identity linking:** the shopper connects their account with the brand, over OAuth - **Orders:** status updates after the purchase - **Payment:** secure payment token exchange Google built the first implementation, in AI Mode in Search and in the Gemini app. Two details from Google's merchant documentation are worth underlining. The brand stays the merchant of record, keeping the customer data and the relationship. And brands with complex checkouts can use an embedded checkout instead of Google's native one. In March, Google added multi-item carts and real-time catalog lookups, with Salesforce and Stripe among the platforms adopting the protocol. At I/O in May, it introduced Universal Cart, a cart across stores that "understands your payment method perks, loyalty information and merchant offers." ## What the roadmap says UCP's public roadmap lists three priorities. The first is "deeper support for the full consumer journey," and it names three journeys: multi-item checkout, lifecycle management, and **loyalty and member benefits**, to "help users find the best value and businesses achieve a deeper connection with their consumers through account linking." The roadmap also names two industries it will cover next: food, and **lodging**, including "hotel discovery, room selection with various rate options, loyalty, and discounts." The lodging plan is already written down. A charter in UCP's public repository, closed as completed in August with Booking.com, Expedia, Hilton, Marriott, Trip.com and Amadeus named as participating businesses, sets out the order of work: 1. **Checkout:** rate selection, availability, guest details and payment. 2. **Identity linking and loyalty:** linking a guest's account, then exposing loyalty status, member rates and sign-ups. 3. **Later:** shopping shaped by loyalty status, discovery by the guest's constraints, discounts and upsells. The charter refers to an "upcoming Loyalty Extension" that will make identity linking more valuable. Shopify's engineering team has already shown what one can look like: a merchant declares a loyalty extension from its loyalty provider, and agents that support it can "negotiate reward options, provide member credentials, or redeem points." Agents that do not support it simply see no loyalty fields. The roadmap carries the usual caveat that it "does not constitute a commitment to deliver specific features." But the direction is clear, and the hotel industry's largest names are at the table. ## Why loyalty changes the game Today an AI agent comparing two hotels sees two prices. Once loyalty runs through UCP, it can see the price this guest would pay as a member, the points they would earn, and the status benefits they would get. That is the information a frequent traveler uses when they choose, and until now it lived only on the brand's own site or app. This is the strongest argument a brand has against intermediaries in AI. An OTA can match a public rate. It cannot offer your member rate, your points, or your upgrade, unless the guest has linked their account with you. In the AI channel, loyalty becomes a permission the customer grants to the brand, and that permission routes the booking. It also raises the cost of standing still. A brand that does not expose member benefits through the protocol will look, to the agent, like any other seller of the same room or product. The agent will have no reason to prefer you. ## What to do now Loyalty in UCP builds on pieces brands can prepare today: 1. **Make checkout agent-ready.** Live prices, availability and a checkout an agent can complete. Without this, loyalty has nothing to attach to. 2. **Link identity properly.** Account linking over OAuth is already part of the stable protocol. Decide what a linked member can see and do. 3. **Treat member rates as data, not a page.** Rates, points balances and status benefits have to be queryable, not only displayed after login. 4. **Plan for after the purchase.** Order updates are already in the protocol, and lifecycle management is on the roadmap. The brand that serves the customer after checkout is the one that keeps them. 5. **Measure the channel.** Track which purchases started in an assistant and how members behave there compared with your site. ## Where this leaves brands At Bazak we run our customers' agents across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and their own sites, and we now support UCP checkout. The pattern we see is the one the roadmap describes. First the assistant learns to recommend you. Then it learns to sell for you. The next step is that it knows who your customer is, and treats them the way you do. The brands that will win that step are not the ones with the most traffic. They are the ones whose loyalty program an agent can actually use. ## Sources - [UCP, Roadmap](https://ucp.dev/documentation/roadmap/) - [UCP, Lodging charter, issue #543](https://github.com/Universal-Commerce-Protocol/ucp/issues/543) - [UCP, Specification overview](https://ucp.dev/2026-04-08/specification/overview/) - [Shopify Engineering, Building the Universal Commerce Protocol, January 2026](https://shopify.engineering/UCP) - [Google, Universal Commerce Protocol updates improve AI shopping for retailers, March 2026](https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/shopping/ucp-updates/) - [Google, Getting started with Universal Commerce Protocol on Google](https://developers.google.com/merchant/ucp) - [Google, 100 things we announced at Google I/O 2026](https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/ai/google-io-2026-all-our-announcements/) --- [Bazak](https://bazak.ai) · [Get a demo](https://bazak.ai/demo) · [All pages](https://bazak.ai/llms.txt)