Google CEO Sundar Pichai expects AI agents to land on your website one of two ways: by clicking through pages the way a person does, or by calling an agent-native protocol. Both will grow, he told Alex Heath on the Sources podcast, but only one scales fast.
Two roads into your site
Pichai called the browser path “a very elegant way to work” because it mirrors what a user would do and keeps controls that put users in the loop. But he was clear about the ceiling: when agents need to work at scale, page-by-page clicking is the slower route.
Protocols are the second road. Pichai pointed to momentum behind MCP, agent protocols and payment protocols, including Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). He expects “a chaotic evolution” before the industry lands on interoperable standards.
His prediction: browsing and protocols both keep growing, but protocols scale much better while taking longer to develop.
What this means for your traffic and ads
Google’s hosted agents already browse with the Google-Agent user-agent string. Google classifies it as a user-triggered fetcher, meaning an end-user asked for the action. Because of that, Google says these fetches usually do not follow robots.txt directives.
Translation: blocking Google-Agent in robots.txt is unlikely to keep Google’s hosted agents out. You need to audit what they can see and whether your site can serve them.
When Alex Heath asked how Google protects its ads business while agents browse, Pichai answered that the right long-term approach is to put users first and ask what users would want. He said the market will find an equilibrium—and that equilibrium will shift. He compared this to the internet’s early days, when home buying and selling were expected to change almost instantly, but many methods stayed similar for roughly 20 years.
Pichai also expects agents to give users one unified experience across Search and Gemini—a shift that will blur the line between a query and a transaction.
The protocol play already has a door open
UCP is Google’s open standard for agent commerce, built with a group of companies. Merchants can adopt it to enable agentic actions in AI Mode and Gemini, starting with direct buying.
Google has already added a Merchant Center option for cart transfer, which sends a shopper’s items from Google to the merchant’s site. UCP’s overview page also points to lodging and food features marked “coming soon,” each with a waitlist.
- Watch for Google-Agent in your crawler logs—it is a user-triggered fetcher, not a hostile bot.
- Treat robots.txt as a weak control for agent traffic; Google publishes the IP ranges these fetchers use.
- Test UCP cart transfer in Merchant Center if you run e-commerce.
- Prepare product data and structured attributes agents can read without a human click path.
What to do this quarter
Treat agents as a new acquisition channel, not a future hypothetical. Pichai expects Gemini’s agent features, currently mostly available to Ultra and Pro subscribers, to become more widely accessible over the next few months. More users with agents means more agent-side shopping intent moving through protocols and browsers.
A practical framework: map every customer touchpoint into “human-visible” and “agent-readable” layers. If your product page only persuades a person, you may win clicks but lose purchases when an agent compares options on price, availability and compatibility.
Don’t wait for the standards to settle. Pichai’s description of “micro equilibriums” suggests different verticals will tip at different times. The brands that turn on protocol access early will capture demand while competitors debate.
Source: Search Engine Journal
