The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), explained

You've probably seen the phrase "buy directly inside ChatGPT" and wondered what actually makes that work. The short answer is a new class of open standards for agentic checkout - the best-known being the Agentic Commerce Protocol, ACP. Here's a plain, honest explanation.

What ACP is

The Agentic Commerce Protocol is an open specification for letting an AI agent complete a purchase from a merchant on a shopper's behalf. It defines two things merchants care about: a product feed format so an agent can discover and understand what you sell, and a checkout flow so the agent can place an order and hand off payment securely - without the merchant losing control of the transaction.

The problem it solves

Before a shared standard, every agent-to-store integration was bespoke. If a shopper wanted to buy through an assistant, someone had to build a custom bridge between that assistant and that store's checkout. That doesn't scale. A protocol makes the interaction predictable: any compliant agent can present any compliant merchant's products and complete a purchase the same way - the way HTTP made any browser able to load any website.

How it works, roughly

• Discovery. The merchant exposes a structured product feed (identity, price, availability, identifiers, images). The agent ingests it and can recommend the products accurately.
• Checkout. When the shopper decides to buy, the agent initiates a checkout session against the merchant, collects payment through a supported processor, and the order lands in the merchant's system like any other.
• Control stays with the merchant. Pricing, inventory, tax and fulfilment remain the merchant's - the agent is a new sales surface, not a new owner of the relationship.

What ACP is not

It is not a marketplace that takes your customer, and it is not a replacement for your store. It's a way for agents to sell your products on your terms. It also isn't finished or universal yet - this is an emerging area with more than one standard in motion, and the details are still settling.

What merchants should do now

You don't need to bet on a single protocol to be ready for all of them, because they share a foundation: clean, complete, machine-readable product data. If your feed is accurate and your identifiers are present, you're most of the way to being agent-ready whichever standard wins. You can grade your feed against the ACP-style requirements with our free ACP Feed Checker.

What this means for your store, in four steps (updated August 2026)

• Check what agents can read today. Your robots.txt decides whether AI crawlers see your store at all - the free store readiness check flags exactly which ones you block.
• Fix the catalog before the protocol. Missing brands, thin descriptions and absent identifiers hurt you in every standard at once. The product page check shows one product the way a machine sees it.
• Get your feed into shape. OpenAI's product feed is the concrete, live implementation of the discovery half - our ChatGPT product feed guide walks through the required fields, formats and registration, straight from their spec.
• Validate, then submit. Run the ACP Feed Checker before you register anything - a graded report beats finding out from a rejection.

For the bigger picture of where this fits, read what is agentic commerce - or, for the storefront half of the story, what an AI storefront is.