Good evening.
One of my goals for The Aisle is to take you behind the press releases and LinkedIn announcements to find out how key decisions in this new era of retail are actually being made…and why.
Today’s “Center Aisle” feature below aims to do some of that. Let me know what you think.
But first, a quick update on the David vs. Goliath battle starring Amazon and Perplexity. Amazon won a preliminary injunction against Perplexity earlier this week, with a federal judge temporarily barring the AI startup’s Comet shopping agent from accessing Amazon. Amazon had argued when it sued Perplexity in November that the tool was disguising automated activity as a normal human browsing session rather than identifying itself as an AI agent acting on a user’s behalf.
The case is one of the first legal tests of AI shopping agents and who gets to control access to online shopping sites. I’ve heard from many of you who care about the ramifications of future rulings. But this one is also noteworthy because it comes as Amazon experiments with its own controversial “Buy for Me” feature, which can purchase products from other retailers’ websites. Amazon has argued that the situations are different because brands and retailers can opt out of the Buy for Me program.
Perplexity had a week to appeal, and I’d expect them to.
If you missed it, I previously wrote about the Amazon/Perplexity standoff, as well as Amazon’s own controversial Buy for Me AI tool.
Now on to the good stuff…
The Center Aisle
As I’ve written before and many of you in the industry know well, Google has on numerous occasions over the last 15 years tried to turn its search dominance into real influence over how people actually buy things online, with many failures to date.
Yes, Google drives massive referral traffic to retailers and consumer brands across the board. But when it comes to creating an environment on Google properties where shoppers want to transact—and merchants want them to—Google has really struggled.
Still, with massive potential disruption to its existing business and others in the AI era, Google is trying again. This time with some major help.
In January, Google and Shopify unveiled the Universal Commerce Protocol, or UCP, an attempt to architect new online plumbing for a future where AI assistants across the web, not just Google’s own products like Gemini or AI Mode in Search, handle more of the shopping journey and maybe eventually make purchases for us too.
Since then, I’ve been trying to understand how the partnership came together and, frankly, how much it matters, especially if the future the two companies are planning for seems much further off to some than the hype of the last few months would suggest.
So in recent weeks, I spoke with technology leaders at both Google and Shopify about how the protocol came together, how they are viewing past failures, some surprising players who are tinkering with UCP behind the scenes, and what this next era means for brands and retailers who want to be ready to capitalize on the shift, whenever it happens.
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