Google unveiled Gemini Intelligence at the Android Show on May 12, alongside a new laptop called the Googlebook. The company describes Gemini Intelligence as a layer that runs beneath the Android operating system across laptops, phones, watches, and glasses.

The new Googlebook is built from the ground up around an AI agent that understands what’s on your screen and acts on it for you. Point at a date in an email, and it’ll set up a meeting. Select pieces of furniture in an app, and it’ll show you what they’d look like in your living room.

Now that an operating system can complete tasks without users even opening a webpage, how people search, discover, and conduct commerce will fundamentally change. Let’s look at how this will affect the search industry.

What the shift to an agentic operating system means

Up until now, a person had a question or intent, typed it into a search engine, received a list of links, and chose one. Getting your website to rank on that list was the prize, and the entire SEO industry was built around earning that click.

Gemini Intelligence assumes something completely different. A user still has search intent, but an AI agent now handles the middle steps — reading pages, filling out forms, and, increasingly, completing the task for you. Instead of you visiting a website, an AI agent visits it on your behalf.

One example is Chrome Auto Browse, launched in January and built on Gemini 3. It handles multistep tasks like researching flights, filling out forms, scheduling appointments, and managing subscriptions, then pauses to ask before making a purchase.

Ecommerce has a good reason to move toward agentic AI.

A 2025 preprint evaluated the declared-tools approach across online shopping, authentication, and content management. It found that handing an agent pre-structured interaction data cut processing requirements by 67.6% and reduced costs by 34% to 63%, compared with parsing the full HTML document. Task success was only slightly lower than with the traditional method: 97.9%, compared with 98.8%.

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The architecture behind Gemini Intelligence

AI agents prefer sites they can transact with cleanly because it’s more efficient. Gemini Intelligence only works if agents can reliably perform tasks on websites.

Two protocols make this possible: WebMCP makes a site’s actions callable, and the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) allows an agent to complete a sale. Together, they let an agent finish the job without a human having to load a page.

WebMCP

This API lets a website declare its functions as structured tools an agent can call, such as searching inventory, starting checkout, or submitting a support request. This effectively lets you hand an AI agent a labeled menu.

Google co-developed WebMCP with Microsoft. An origin trial is live in Chrome 149, Firefox has committed to the third quarter of 2026, and Safari is expected to follow in the fourth quarter.

Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)

This protocol gives AI agents a common language to discover products, build a cart, complete checkout, and handle orders without a user visiting the site. Google also has a consumer-facing surface layer called Universal Cart, which collects items as you move across Search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail.

Google, Shopify, Walmart, Target, Etsy, Wayfair, PayPal, and Stripe co-developed UCP, which launched in January.

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How to prepare for agentic AI

Websites are rapidly changing from destinations to backends, from places people visit to places agents quietly use. The operating system is becoming the search layer. The question is no longer whether you rank, but whether an agent can use your site.

To prepare, audit your most valuable actions, whether that’s a lead form, booking flow, or checkout page, and ask whether an agent could complete them instead. Check your Lighthouse Agentic Browsing score the way you check Core Web Vitals to see whether an agent can use your site in addition to reading it.

If you run ecommerce, find out whether your checkout is reachable through UCP or ACP. Keep doing the retrieval work, because an agent still has to find and trust you before it can act on your behalf.

Dig deeper. Are we ready for the agentic web?