Google Names Hotels as Next Vertical for Agentic Shopping

Google on Tuesday named hotel booking as the next vertical for its Universal Commerce Protocol, publicly committing to extending its agentic commerce infrastructure to travel.

The announcement came via a blog post by Vidhya Srinivasan, vice president and general manager of ads and commerce, alongside a wave of shopping updates at the company's annual I/O developer conference.

UCP, the system that lets AI agents handle purchases inside Google's search and chat interfaces, is expanding "to even more verticals, starting soon with hotel booking and local food delivery," Srinivasan wrote.