Shopping online? Google wants you to trust AI to click the buy button for you. Rolling out today, Google’s new “agentic checkout” adds onto the company’s existing price-tracking feature, so it’s not something you’ll see all the time. Instead, when you get a price drop notification on an object you’ve been tracking, you might now see a new “buy for me” button that will send all the necessary information to the store’s website and make the final purchase for you.
Credit: Google
Google says the AI will always ask your permission before starting agentic checkout, and will only go through with the purchase after you’ve confirmed all your shipping and payment details (which it will either pull from your Google Pay details, or directly ask you for). The price you’ll see also isn’t informed by AI, but rather by Google’s Shopping Graph, the same information that powers Google Search’s Shopping tab. That means it’ll come directly from the store you’ll be buying from, although while Google does promise it’ll surface the most relevant offers for you, just trusting whatever the notification says will take away your ability to manually comparison shop. Once the AI has made your purchase for you, you should see all the usual confirmation emails hit whatever inbox you told the AI to link with your purchase.
It all makes sense in theory—you’re essentially being given a link to a product, and then telling the AI to go to that link and fill out the checkout form for you. That should cut down on hallucination concerns, assuming you’re happy with the link you’re buying from. The catch is that every website’s checkout form is a little different, so Google’s starting with just a few stores for now, to cut down on the chance for errors. That means you’ll only be able to try agentic checkout when buying from Wayfair, Chewy, Quince, and “select Shopify merchants” for now, but Google says there will be “many more [stores] coming soon.”
While agentic checkout does take what can be a lengthy process down to a single click for buyers, the real use case here might be for sellers. Ensuring people actually click through to your store from a price drop notification can be a pain, and letting customers buy straight from the notification with a single button could make impulse purchases a bit more likely. If you notice yourself about to buy something just because a shiny new button is there, maybe take a beat before tapping it and consider whether you still want it or if you want to check other options yourself first.
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt
If you want to try out agentic checkout for yourself, you’ll first need to start tracking a product’s price, and ensure it’s something Wayfair, Chewy, or another participating retailer would sell. To do this, head to the Google Shopping tab, search for either a specific product or a broader product category, and scroll until you find a product card you want to track. Click through and hit the “Track price button.” Here, choose a target price as well as options like size or color, and click “Update” in the bottom right corner. You’ll now get a notification when a listing matches the parameters you set, and if the link Google found is from a participating store, you’ll be able to use the “Buy for me” button. Click or tap it to ensure your details are correct, then tap “Buy for me with GPay” at the bottom of the screen. You’ll get a progress bar showing when your purchase has been submitted and confirmed, and the page will tell you where to expect your confirmation email. You’ll also get a Buy for me reference ID you can take to Google support, in case you run into any issues.
Credit: Google
Unfortunately, it seems like there’s still a few features Google needs to work on here before the AI can do everything a human can. A Google spokesperson told me that agentic checkout currently can’t take factors like loyalty programs into account, so if you want to buy the product from a specific store account to get credit for it, you’ll still need to make your purchase manually.
If you’re buying a lot, it could be a time saver, but as for now, those caveats and the limited selection of stores means you’ll probably still have to complete checkout yourself on most purchases right now.
