Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)
The Agentic Commerce Protocol is an open standard from OpenAI and Stripe that lets AI agents buy from a business for a person.
The Agentic Commerce Protocol, or ACP, is an open standard that lets an AI agent buy something from a business on a person's behalf. OpenAI and Stripe made it, and it's open source. The ACP site has the specification.
Put simply, it's a shared way for an assistant and a shop to agree on an order and pay for it, without the person going to the shop's website.
How it works
The person tells the assistant what they want and confirms the purchase. The assistant sends the order to the business through ACP. The business stays the seller: it decides which products it offers, how they're shown, and whether to accept each order. Payment details are passed on in a way that doesn't expose the card itself.
The ACP site names ChatGPT as the first AI platform to use it, and Stripe as the first payment company to support it.
An example
Someone asks ChatGPT for a good bag of beans for filter coffee, under £15. ChatGPT shows a few products, including one from Kestrel Roasters. The person tells it to buy that one, and the order goes straight to Kestrel, who ships it as usual. The person never opened Kestrel's site.
Why it matters to marketers
When people can buy inside the answer, being the product the assistant shows matters even more. Your product data has to be accurate and complete, because the assistant may be the only shop window the buyer sees. Prices that don't match, or missing stock, can cost you the sale.
In AnswerOrbit
We don't track ACP itself. What we do track is the shopping side of ChatGPT's answers. Shopping shows which products ChatGPT puts in its product cards for your prompts, how often yours come first, and the prices it quotes. Its Merchants tab shows the shops where ChatGPT sends people to buy.