Microsoft UCP support turns Copilot shopping into agent-readable commerce

Microsoft is trying to make products legible to AI agents before those agents become a serious source of commerce traffic. The important change is not another ad format by itself: on April 21, Microsoft said UCP-ready feeds are generally available in the U.S. in Microsoft Merchant Center, giving merchants a structured way to surface product data inside Copilot.

The source frames the web in three modes: people searching for items, LLMs helping people choose, and agents completing tasks on a customer’s behalf. Microsoft says automated traffic is growing 8x faster than human traffic, AI-driven sessions nearly tripled in 2025, and agentic browser traffic rose roughly 8,000% year over year. That makes product data quality a distribution problem, not only a marketing problem.

The concrete commerce layer is Universal Commerce Protocol support in Merchant Center. Microsoft says UCP-ready feeds let businesses provide accurate, structured product information optimized for agents. Separately, Shopify Catalog is being integrated into Copilot through Microsoft’s commerce API, bringing product data from millions of Shopify merchants into Copilot with real-time pricing, inventory, and attributes. Microsoft also says top Shopify merchants in its analysis saw nearly 90% relative growth in impression share in Copilot Shopping from February 26 to March 26.

Checkout is moving in the same direction. Copilot Checkout, first introduced at NRF, now deepens catalog data across more than 500,000 merchants and expands to Copilot mobile apps. Microsoft is also adding loyalty experiences, with Target as an early launch partner for account linking that can show Target Circle benefits during checkout. These experiences are live in the U.S. today, according to the post.

For readers building commerce, ad tech, or agent platforms, the signal is that AI discovery is becoming operational. Click rankings and page visits no longer explain every decision path if an assistant reads feeds, compares offers, and completes a purchase. The businesses that adapt fastest will be the ones that treat product catalogs, pricing, inventory, policies, and loyalty data as machine-readable infrastructure. Source: Microsoft Advertising.