Google is testing a Flipkart-branded “Buy” button inside Gemini and AI Mode in India, TechCrunch reported on September 26, and the pilot draws the sharpest line yet between merchants who can transact inside an AI answer and those who show up as a link. On the same result page where Flipkart carries a purchase control, Amazon appears without one.

That asymmetry is the story. Discovery and saleability have quietly split into two different gates.

The mechanism is the Universal Commerce Protocol, which Google launched on January 11, 2026 with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart as co-developers. More than twenty organizations have since endorsed it, including Adyen, American Express, Best Buy, Macy’s Inc., Mastercard, Stripe, The Home Depot, Visa, and Zalando. UCP is designed to be compatible with Agent2Agent, the Agent Payments Protocol, and the Model Context Protocol, and it runs through Merchant Center, where Google is rolling out dozens of new product data attributes. Retailers, per Google’s engineering post, “remain the Merchant of Record.”

The India pilot isn’t incidental geography. India has more than one billion internet subscribers and the world’s second-largest online population, and Google put roughly $350 million into Flipkart in 2024 as part of a Walmart-led round. A broader rollout is planned for later in October. In the US, Lowe’s, Michael’s, Poshmark, and Reebok are already live with Business Agent, and Petco, e.l.f. Cosmetics, Samsonite, and Rugs USA are piloting Direct Offers.

A Google spokesperson said the company is “always testing new features and experiences to help people discover and connect with businesses more easily.” Read structurally, that’s the pitch: platforms have historically extracted rent at the ranking layer, and UCP moves the toll booth one step closer to checkout.

For a small product brand, the work is unglamorous and immediate: clean product data, the new Merchant Center attributes, and a decision about UCP participation. It sits alongside the parallel scramble to answer inbound customer calls Gemini now routes, to drive visual product traffic from lens-based queries, and to read AI shopping visibility as a standard merchant dashboard. LemonLime tracks these surface changes and prepares the outreach and data work a founder would otherwise miss. Get started.

Being findable used to be the game. Now it’s the qualifier round.

Sources