Amazon adopts Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)

John Ebbert

UCP

The co-developed Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) launched by Google at NRF in January added a slate of companies to its Tech Council —signaling broad adoption of the open-source standard for agentic commerce.

Ashish Gupta, Google’s VP/GM of Merchant Shopping said on Friday:

  • “Today we welcome new members to the UCP Tech Council, including Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce and Stripe, joining us alongside Shopify, Etsy, Target, and Wayfair. Their expertise and scale will be instrumental in ensuring a unified vision and strengthening #UCP as the open standard for #AgenticCommerce. Building UCP is a team sport, and we’re excited to continue this journey with our industry partners. We are just getting started.” Read more on LinkedIn. (April 24)

Building on the UCP Tech Council news, Microsoft CVP Tim Frank wrote:

  • “This is straightforward network effect: a single protocol that all agents understand, working across the web. This aligns incentives as everyone benefits more from a rich, interoperable commerce layer than from winning a standards war. That’s why we are joining this coalition today.” Read more on LinkedIn. (April 24)

Vidhya Srinivasan, Google VP/GM, Advertising & Commerce added on LinkedIn (April 24):

  • “Each new partner brings deep expertise in how commerce and payments operate at a global scale. By building with the ecosystem, for the ecosystem, we can scale UCP adoption and help make agentic commerce a reality for shoppers everywhere.

Read: “Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Stripe Join the Universal Commerce Protocol Tech Council” (April 26) – press release

According to Google engineer Amit Handa on GitHub, the new council members are:

More:

  • Announcing new Tech Council members #379 (April 24) – GitHub
  • Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) Official Specification – UCP
  • Opinion: “Amazon finally made an agentic commerce move! (…) UCP is winning against ChatGPT+Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Protocol” (April 24) – Juozas Kaziukėnas on LinkedIn

From tipsheet: The real question isn’t whether commerce becomes agentic — it’s how much of the workflow agents absorb. Fully autonomous buying is the headline, but who really buys that (pun intended)? The near-term reality is agents swallowing the operational layer first: discovery, pricing, inventory, checkout, and post-purchase.

For example, here’s a list of recent UCP agent updates from Shopify engineer Ilya Grigorik.

But as analyst Eric Seufert has argued, fully autonomous commerce may be overstated. For now, the user stays in the loop even as the steps in between start to disappear.

LLMs & CHATBOTS

Developments

  • Google Plans to Invest Up to $40 Billion in Anthropic (April 24) – Bloomberg (subscription)
  • “What excites me most about being at OpenAI is not any single launch, but what these tools make possible for people around the world. By that measure, this week was certainly one for the books…” (April 26) – Sarah Friar, CFO, OpenAI on LinkedIn
  • Anthropic created a test marketplace for agent-on-agent commerce (April 25) – TechCrunch

MEASUREMENT

How to pace with ROI

On LinkedIn, Meta AI and machine learning engineer Djordje Gligorijevic shared his team’s latest research titled, “Pacing with ROI: Budget Allocation in Sponsored Search.”

Mr. Gligorijevic explained on Saturday:

“In online marketplaces like eBay, the central challenge for advertisers is budget pacing: effectively allocating spend over time to balance immediate opportunities against future high-value auctions. While traditional methods often rely on heuristics, they frequently fail to provide rigorous Return-on-Investment (ROI) guarantees or account for platform-side minimum spending requirements. We developed theoretically-motivated algorithms for a unified online optimization framework that jointly accounts for advertiser budget/ROI constraints and platform minimum spend. We explored three distinct forms of ROI: utility-based, click-based, and impression-based, demonstrating how each shapes the trade-off between advertiser utility and platform revenue.

This work is another step in bridging the gap between empirical budget pacing and theoretical performance guarantees, offering a scalable solution for non-stationary environments.”

Read more on LinkedIn. (April 25)

The research: “Pacing with ROI: Budget Allocation in Sponsored Search” (March 2) – OpenReview

From tipsheet: The research is another example of Meta rolling out its big AI brains for all to see — part of the AI PR wars and proof for Wall Street that all that capex for AI is worth it.

Meanwhile, for Gligorijevic and team, ROI is a design choice. How you define it — whether utility, clicks, or impressions — determines how spend is allocated and who captures value, especially as agentic systems increasingly enforce those constraints.

SELL-SIDE

Reviewing Reddit ad products, strategy

Reddit hosted a webinar on Friday “to review key ad products and strategies getting traction with advertisers,” according to analyst New Street Research analyst Dan Salmon.

In a note to investors, Salmon provided his key takeaways including:

  • “Expanded translation services and international user growth.”
  • “Pixel-based retargeting vs search keywords.”
  • “Use ad copy that ‘sounds like Reddit.’”
  • “Training LLMs about brands.”
  • “No early beta results from Max campaigns.”

More: Reddit releases its Q1 2025 earnings this Thursday, April 30 – Reddit

FINANCIALS

Earnings reports this week

TECH

What the bid stream needs

In a thoughtful post on his personal blog, Viant product leader Keith Petri takes a step back and connects recent infrastructure moves like Dynamic Traffic Engine (DTE) and Index Cloud.

His thesis: the real shift isn’t packaging supply into “premium” deal IDs. In fact, it’s filtering impressions before they ever reach the bidder.

He starts with DTE:

“On April 15, the IAB Tech Lab announced that Amazon Ads is donating its Dynamic Traffic Engine, or DTE, as open-source code. DTE is a pre-bid filtering layer. It lets a DSP publish its preferences (ad formats, positions, regions, refresh rates, time-of-day weights, deal ID exclusions) to a cloud-hosted rules engine. SSPs read those rules through an evaluator library and shape their traffic accordingly, forwarding or filtering each impression before it ever reaches the bidder.

The mechanics are simple. The DSP signals what it wants. The SSP listens and shapes the bid stream accordingly. Infrastructure gets streamlined. Listening costs drop. Bid density on the impressions that matter goes up. The traffic that would have been thrown away on the DSP’s side never leaves the SSP’s side in the first place.”

Read: “The Bid Stream Doesn’t Need Better Curation” – Keith Petri on his blog

From tipsheet: Curation packages supply for humans. Filtering shapes inputs for machines — and in an AI-driven market, the inputs are the strategy.

PLATFORMS

Agentic help desk, please

Over the weekend, PubMatic product leader Chandni Patel raised up her company’s new agentic partnership with ad platform AdRoll.

She wrote on LinkedIn:

“When we first shared our vision for agent-to-agent communication across supply chain partners, the goal was to rethink manual workflows with seamless, automated collaborations.

Today, that vision comes to life again through our new partnership with AdRoll. By leveraging the Model Context Protocol (MCP), we’ve connected PubMatic and AdRoll’s AI agents to diagnose and fix deal issues in real-time. This collapsed the siloed workflows that took days into a more efficient, interoperable action completion in minutes.”

Read more on LinkedIn. (April 25)

Read: AdRoll and PubMatic Enable Agent-Powered Deal Troubleshooting via MCP Integration (April 23) – press release

From tipsheet: This isn’t about just a better help desk. It’s agents operating across the supply chain — moving from tickets and troubleshooting to coordinated execution. The help desk is the wedge. The real shift is agents executing across DSP and SSP boundaries.

SELL-SIDE

AI Overviews providing more clicks

On Friday, search marketing agency Seer Interactive provided an update to its previous research on the performance of Google’s AI Overviews (AIO).

Good news for publishers? AIO CTR has gone up.

From the Seer research team:

“What’s Changed Since Our Q4 2025 Projections?

After publishing the original CTR & AIO analysis in February 2025 and our September 2025 update, 2025 was a year of near-continuous CTR compression on AIO-affected queries. Our model predicted that decline would continue into 2026.

But then in January and February 2026, it didn’t. In some cases by more than 2.5 percentage points. While we’re not back to pre-AIO CTRs, and don’t expect to be, the decline has slowed and that indicates we may have passed the worst of the period after a new Google SERP change and are starting to see a leveling out or what might be the ‘new normal.’”

On paid ads:

“Brand-Cited paid CTR held between 13.99% and 17.95% all year with no meaningful decline. Whatever AIO is doing to organic results, it is not doing the same thing to paid ads. Paid and organic are operating in different environments on the same SERP, and you should plan accordingly.”

Read: AI Overviews Impact on Google CTR: 2026 Update (April 24) – Seer Interactive

More: Google AI Overviews CTR shows early signs of recovery: Study (April 24) – Search Engine Land

Related: (Video) The future of search, maps and AI agents (April 24) – Nick Fox, SVP Knowledge + Information, Google on LinkedIn

PLATFORMS

Your margin is my opportunity

You can’t buy media with your credit card on Amazon anymore. Increasingly, the 2–3% credit card fee is being reclaimed by platforms that are cutting out intermediaries and moving closer to the money itself.

AdExchanger’s James Hercher has been tracking the shift.

Read:

  • Amazon Faces An Easy Boycott But An Existential Question (April 24) – AdExchanger
  • Sallie Has An Ad Business And Meta Is Declining Credit Cards (March 5) – AdExchanger

From tipsheet: Payments are infrastructure until they’re margin. Platforms are collapsing the stack: media, commerce, and now payments. Credit cards used to fund growth (float + rewards) and now they’re friction.

AI accelerates this by tightening the loop between demand, decisioning, and spend — making control of the payment layer more valuable.

EVENTS

Possible is this week

The annual advertising conference Possible will be taking place this week in Miami, Florida.

Ad Age’s Chief Technology Reporter Garett Sloane previewed the show — and his latest article — on LinkedIn:

“I will be at Possible for the first time this year. I have, of course, followed the rise of the conference from its inception, and talked with Christian Muche of Possible about the draw to Miami. All conferences have their own vibe so I expect to get a sense of that from the ground. But here is the curtain-raiser from Ad Age…

CMOs are the main draw, and I am especially eager to see White Castle CMO speak with Lee Newman, CEO of GSD&M. The burger wars have had quite a year and White Castle is bringing life to sliders in new ways…”

Read more on LinkedIn.

Read: “Why CMOs have become the most valuable currency at Possible” (April 24) – Ad Age (subscription)

More:

  • Possible 2026 agenda – Possible
  • What to Expect from Possible 2026: Eden Roc Expansion, Invite-Only Programming, A-Listers, and More (April 24) – Adweek (subscription)
  • Podcast: Mission Possible: How Marketing’s Buzziest Gathering Was Built with Christian Muche (April 21) – Adweek
  • Can Possible become marketing’s Davos? (April 14) – The Trade Desk’s The Current
  • Possible expands not only its area but also its marketer presence, aka ‘gold dust’ (April 9) – Digiday

MORE

  • “Sovereign Internet: The Most Important AI regulation that I think is coming” (April 25) – Henry Innis, co-founder, Mutinex on his Substack
  • “Amazon’s next moves in AI shopping” (April 23) – Jason Del Rey on Read The Aisle
  • “KYA — Why Your AI Agent Needs a Passport” – Bostjan Spetic, Corporate VP, Teads on his personal blog
  • The Contract Layer for Agentic Advertising (April 22) – Shailley Singh, COO, IAB Tech Lab on IAB Tech Lab’s blog
  • Why Microsoft’s AI Ad Strategy Deserves More Attention From PPC Managers (April 24) – Search Engine Journal