Gemini becomes a commerce runtime

Google’s quietly doing a pretty wild thing with Gemini. On the surface, it used to look like “LLM with shopping links”. Cute, incremental, very 2023. But if you read between the lines after UCP, it’s starting to look more like a commerce runtime. Think of Gemini not as a chatbot, but as a protocol layer that talks directly to: - Checkout - Wallets - Loyalty systems - Offers and promos So if AI becomes the main UI from “I’m exploring” to “I’m choosing” to “I’m paying”, Google has basically moved the ad auction inside the model’s context window. The “sponsored result” is no longer a blue link. It might be which product the agent bothers to mention, which offer it decides to apply, or which merchant ends up one tap away from “Confirm”. For founders, this flips a few questions: - You don’t just ask “How do I rank in search?” You ask “How do I get into the model’s tools and protocols?” - Your edge is not just SEO anymore. It might be being the fastest, cleanest API for a specific intent. Search was about pages competing in a browser. This is services competing in a context window.