Agent Payments Protocol (AP2)
AP2 is Google’s proposed way for agents to pay with signed mandates — what the agent is allowed to buy, and on whose behalf.
If shopping agents become real, product feeds, refunds, and identity matter more than blog posts. GEO still decides whether you are even a candidate SKU.
Treat the spec as early. Do not rebuild checkout on a blog post.
Examples
- A travel agent books a fare within a user-signed budget cap.
- A site that only accepts humans solving captchas will miss agent checkout.
Related terms
Agentic commerce is shopping done by software: find, compare, buy, with a human in the loop somewhere — or not.
Structured product data assistants use to compare and maybe buy. Cousin of Merchant Center feeds.
A protocol riff on HTTP 402 so agents can pay for resources. Experimental economics for crawling and APIs.
FAQ
Do I need AP2 this quarter? +
Only if you are in agent-commerce pilots. Everyone else: keep product data clean and pages fetchable.
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