How UCP Could Erase Your Customer Journey Data

by Brennen Bliss, Founder & CEO @ Propellic

Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is our first glimpse into what it may look like to book travel from both travel tech and operators in the near future directly from the chat interface.

Since introducing travel to its ecosystem (Google Flights, Google Hotels, Google Travel/Things to Do, etc.), Google has maintained a position of discovery & research for travel - leaving booking and merchant of record responsibilities with travel tech and operators. — UCP, Google’s open standard “designed for the [AI] future of commerce,” has the potential to deliver bookings (still not as merchant of record), all without requiring users to leave Google surfaces in many cases.

Universal Commerce Protocol was announced on January 11th and is somewhat similar to OpenAI & Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), which was unveiled back in September. Google’s platform is different in that it’s more neutral and wide-reaching, is payment-agnostic, and truly is an “open standard” - at least more than OpenAI’s, which requires Stripe merchant services and is really centered around ChatGPT interfaces.

With Google first rolling out UCP to shopping feeds, it’s reasonable to expect that they’ll transition this protocol over to travel research (Google Flights, Google Hotels, Google Things to Do, etc.). In doing so, just as you see with shopping, users will be able to chat with Gemini & AI Mode (as well as any external agent that uses UCP) and increasingly complete their research, planning, and booking all from within the chat interface.

If this is an outcome that we encounter, we’ll see less and less web traffic, know less about our customers, and we’ll significantly struggle to build retargeting audiences from web traffic. Whereas we can currently track users through their specific page visits to understand the buyer journey, if UCP takes hold in Google Travel, we won’t know anything until a booking comes through - and at that point, we’ll only have the booking details, making the job of marketers even more difficult (just what we needed).

As with anything in today’s environment, time will tell whether we find UCP making its way into travel purchases - but if & when it does, you can expect the impact on marketing and customer acquisition to be significant.

Universal Commerce Protocol is highly likely to give preference to data feed quality over webpage content, structured data over content depth, and product eligibility over traditional SEO factors. It’s for this reason that I recommend brands remain ready to allocate resources toward feed, API, and inventory infrastructure as this evolves. It’s a matter of adopting agent-first distribution or losing leverage permanently as we continue our charge into agentic travel research and booking.

Regulatory pressure, especially in Europe, will likely slow rollout - but directionally, Google wants users to stay on their platforms, so it’s not too far of a leap to assume this is the outcome Google is looking for.

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