Google Pulls Back From “Buy For Me”

Summary: Refocusing on a Merchant Message as Merchants control these early days of Agentic

Something quietly changed in Google’s agentic commerce story over the last twelve months, and almost nobody has called it out.

As I related in Google I/O 2025 the headline was “Buy for me.” The pitch was clean and consumer facing: AI finds the product, you set the price you are willing to pay, Google watches the market, you confirm, and Google completes the checkout using Google Pay. Google called it agentic checkout. I wrote at the time that the price of entry for merchants was simply adding the GPay button, and that qualified agentic demand would finally give merchants a reason to do it.

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Federated Models Need Measurement

A follow on blog to my Intent data post yesterday. Where intent is needed for authorization, measurement is needed by every “specialist” participating in an agentic interaction. As background I was founder/CEO of Commerce Signals, focused on measurement and card transaction data. Measurement is a powerful business. In fact, I would say Google started out as a measurement company with the PageRank algorithm. By keeping track of what users clicked on which link for which search word, they created the directory of the internet. Let’s dig a little deeper into why measurement is key in agentic, and for all federated models.

Google is not building a monolithic “central brain” to disintermediate the ecosystem. Instead, as discussed in my UCP Blog (also see Ask Macy’s Case Study), they are fostering a world of specialist collaborative models that interact across three specific technical layers:

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