Hi and welcome back to another edition of The Keyword. This week the big news is Google’s checkout has gone live with the first 2 retailers. With hundreds of more set to be integrated soon too. Billions in commerce could shift to zero-click, in-chat purchases. Which is a big deal! In the video below you can see the checkout flow for yourself.

— Kole

Also coming up:

Customers now buy products from Etsy and Wayfair directly inside AI Mode in Google Search and Google’s Gemini app.

Shoppers can describe what they want to AI, ask follow-ups, and buy their chosen products without ever leaving the AI chat.

Instead of Google referring traffic to merchants, Google completes the full buying process.

Google confirmed that Shopify, which has a 14% share of the US Ecommerce market, plus Target & Walmart will be integrated soon.

This is powered by Google's Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), launched last month.

In simple terms, UCP is a system that connects online stores to Google's AI assistants which handle the entire shopping process on a customer's behalf, from finding the right product to completing a secure payment.

Google says hundreds of tech companies, payment providers, and retailers have signed up to integrate with UCP.

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Users will only see ads if they are logged in and using either the ChatGPTs free plan or $8-per-month ChatGPT Go. Higher-tier plans will remain ad-free.

Nano Banana & Veo 3 are Google’s advanced AI models which generate high-definition (up to 4K) video and images from text input. Advertisers can now access the tools within Google Ads to create assets to run as ads.

According to the Information, the platform will allow publishers to register and license their content directly to AI companies.

Reddit is cited in around 3% of ChatGPT’s answers in a study by Profound. ChatGPT is specifically pulling from Reddit’s individual discussion threads. OpenAI is thought to pay $70M+ per year to Reddit to license the data.

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