Gemini Spark: the AI Agent That Shops Without Visiting Your Website

Living document — last verified 29 September 2026. We update this as Google confirms more.

What is Gemini Spark?

Gemini Spark is Google's 24/7 personal AI agent, announced at Google I/O on 19 May 2026. It is a cloud-based agent (your task keeps running even if you close your laptop or lock your phone). It integrates with Gmail, Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, and can browse the web through Chrome. As Google introduced it at I/O: "your personal AI agent that helps you navigate your digital life, taking action on your behalf and under your direction."

The shopping angle — the bit that matters for UK retailers — is this. Google's help page says Spark can complete web tasks "like shopping", and it asks for your review and confirmation before it makes a purchase. The mechanism Google has announced for letting an agent actually pay is called AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol). It lets the agent transact within guardrails the user sets: specific brands or product types, a spend cap, and conditions that must be met before it buys.

AP2 is rolling out across Google products starting with Gemini Spark in the coming months. That "starting with" phrasing is Google's own. As of September 2026 Google has not confirmed that AP2 purchasing is live in Spark. Its July update says Spark hands sensitive steps such as payments back to you.

What's confirmed now

The following facts come directly from Google's I/O 2026 announcements, the Google Shopping blog (published 19/05/2026), Google's Gemini Spark update of 30/07/2026 and Google's own help pages (checked 29/09/2026):

• Gemini Spark is live, but not in the UK.
  • At I/O 2026 Google said Spark would go to trusted testers the week of 19 May 2026, and to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the US as a beta the following week.
  • It has since expanded to Google AI Pro subscribers. On 30/07/2026 it reached AI Pro subscribers in more than 160 additional countries.
  • Google's help page says it is available wherever Gemini Apps are supported, "except in the European Economic Area, Nigeria, Switzerland and the United Kingdom."
  • It needs a Google AI Pro or Ultra subscription and a personal Google Account (not work or school), and you must be 18 or over.
  • It works in the Gemini mobile app, the Gemini app on Mac and the Gemini web app.
  • It is powered by Gemini 3.5 and uses Google's Antigravity harness.
• Spark keeps you in the loop on payments.
  • Since 30/07/2026 Spark can use your logged-in accounts and saved passwords in Chrome to handle web errands. This is rolling out in the US first.
  • Google says it keeps you in the loop on sensitive actions, "such as payments, by handing the task back to you."
  • Spark also has a "Take control" mode: Gemini pauses and asks you to take over the browser for things like passwords or payment details.
• AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol) is coming to Spark.
  • AP2 lets an AI agent make purchases on a user's behalf within user-defined guardrails: a spend cap, specific brands or products, and buying only when stated criteria are met.
  • Google has said AP2 is rolling out to Google products starting with Gemini Spark "in the coming months".
  • The Google Shopping blog is the primary source.
• Universal Cart and UCP are live in the US.
  • Universal Cart is a shared, Google-hosted basket. Google's help page says it is "currently available only in the United States" and works across Search & Shopping, AI Mode and the Gemini app. YouTube and Gmail were announced "to follow".
  • Checkout happens in one of two ways:
    • with Google Pay on Google, for participating merchants;
    • on the merchant's own site, for everyone else.
  • Retailers connect through the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), which uses REST APIs and supports MCP. The retailer remains the Merchant of Record.
  • Confirmed launch partners in the US: Nike, Sephora, Target, Ulta Beauty, Walmart, Wayfair, and Shopify merchants.
  • Google has not yet documented Spark itself completing a Universal Cart purchase.
• UK Universal Cart: confirmed as "later."
  • Google's Shopping blog stated that UCP checkout is coming to Canada and Australia "in the coming months" and "later to the U.K."
  • Google's merchant help for UCP checkout now covers products eligible in the United States, Canada and Australia, for select merchants.
  • No firm UK date has been given.
• The practical implication is already happening. Regardless of Spark's UK timeline, the pattern it represents is already the direction of travel: AI agents researching and comparing products before (or instead of) a shopper visiting a website. AI Mode in Search, which has been live in the UK since July 2025, already works this way.

What this means for UK retailers' product pages and feeds

Whether or not Spark reaches UK consumers soon, the shift in how product decisions get made has already started. AI Mode in Search is live in the UK and works on the same logic: Google's AI reads your product data, reviews and structured content to decide whether you appear in an answer. A future Spark query runs the same check.

The question an AI agent asks about your product is not "is this merchant's bid high enough?" It is: "does this product reliably match the shopper's criteria?" That match is built from:

1. Your product feed

Conversational Attributes are the newer Merchant Centre fields: question-and-answer pairs, popularity rank, related products, and document links to specs and manuals. They are already live in the UK, and AI Mode reads them when it assembles a product response. If these fields are empty, your products are at a structural disadvantage against any retailer who has filled them in.

2. Reviews and ratings

AI agents weight review volume and score heavily when comparing options. A product with 12 reviews loses to a comparable product with 180, all else being equal. An active review programme — on Google and on your own product pages — is not marketing; it is infrastructure.

3. Schema markup on your website

Schema markup tells both Google's agents and independent AI tools (ChatGPT, Perplexity) exactly what your product is and whether it is in stock. The three types that matter here:

• Product schema: price, availability, brand, GTIN.
• Review schema: rating and review count.
• FAQ schema.

Schema is how a non-Google AI reads a product page without a crawl.

These are not Spark-specific preparations. They are the same foundations for AI Mode visibility, Universal Cart readiness, and any future agentic commerce surface. The work converges.

What we're still waiting on

These items cannot be confirmed at time of writing. We will update this article when Google provides clarity.

• UK Gemini Spark launch date. Google's help page explicitly excludes the United Kingdom, along with the European Economic Area, Switzerland and Nigeria. Its 30/07/2026 expansion to more than 160 countries skipped the UK too. Google has given no UK date and no reason for the exclusion.
• Whether Spark's shopping/AP2 mode is live for current users. At I/O, Google said AP2 is coming to Spark "in the coming months." As of September 2026 it is not confirmed as live. Google's own July update says Spark hands payments back to the user.
• How UK merchants will opt in (or out) of Universal Cart.
  • Merchants with products eligible in the US, Canada or Australia register interest through Google's UCP interest form.
  • They also need a Google Pay & Wallet Console account and must meet UCP's technical requirements.
  • UK-specific onboarding is not documented because the UK is not yet live. The Canada and Australia rollouts are the closest proxy.
• Commercial terms for AP2 transactions. Google's merchant documentation says the retailer remains the seller of record. It does not say whether Google charges any fee on purchases completed via Google Pay in-cart, as opposed to a handoff to the retailer's own site.
• AI Performance Insights UK rollout. This Merchant Centre feature shows share-of-voice in AI Mode and the Gemini app, which makes it directly useful for measuring agent-readiness. As of September 2026 it covers Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and the United States. It is not available in the UK.
• Whether opting out of Universal Cart affects AI Mode visibility. One reported comment from Google Marketing Live suggested that merchants who do not connect may see reduced discoverability. That has not been formally documented. We are tracking this.

What UK retailers should do now

Google has not given a UK date for Spark, so there is no timeline to plan to. The lead time on the underlying work (feed quality, schema, reviews) is measured in months, and that work already pays off in AI Mode, which is live in the UK today. Waiting for a UK launch date to start is waiting too long.

The three highest-leverage actions, in priority order:

1. Audit your Conversational Attributes coverage. Log in to Merchant Centre and check how completely the newer feed fields are filled. Gaps here are the fastest path to being invisible in AI Mode and to agents. For a catalogue of any size, this needs a structured audit, not a spot-check.

2. Check your product and review schema. Run your top product pages through Google's Rich Results Test. Missing or broken schema means AI surfaces (Google and otherwise) cannot reliably read your products. The fix is technical but scoped.

3. Start (or accelerate) your review programme. Review volume is an agent-ranking signal that only compounds over time. There is no shortcut.

If you want a clear view of where your site stands against the full set of agent-readiness signals — feed coverage, schema, llms.txt, AI Mode visibility — our AI Visibility Report is the diagnostic starting point.

For the broader context of how agentic commerce connects to AI Mode, Universal Cart, and what Google's 2026 announcements mean for your search presence, read our guide: Google AI Mode 2026: what the shift to AI search means for UK retailers.

If you are a retailer starting to think through the Universal Cart stay-or-go question, our article Universal Cart UK: should your business join or wait? sets out the decision framework.

For the Merchant Centre feed work that underpins agent discoverability, Conversational Attributes: the UK merchant guide is the practical starting point.

The one action to take this week: open Merchant Centre, pull a sample of your top 20 products, and check how many have Conversational Attributes filled in. That single data point will tell you whether you have a gap — and how urgent it is.