The Alphabet Soup of Agentic Standards: A Vocab Playbook for Merchants and PSPs

The biggest mistake merchants could make in agentic commerce may be waiting for one protocol to win. The emerging infrastructure for artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shopping is beginning to look less like the early browser wars and more like the internet stack itself, comprised of multiple protocols performing different jobs simultaneously. Google ’s developer guide describes an ecosystem crowded with acronyms including MCP, A2A, UCP and AP2.