🔎 Focus: Structured Data
🔴 Impact: High
🟡 Difficulty: Medium-High
Dear Tech SEO 👋
Let’s start this week with heavy news:
The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)
Google on Jan. 11, 2026 launched new layer of technology for (e)Commerce. Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP): Communication layer between your business and AI bots.
Google becoming competitor of Amazon
Google provides buyers not only visitors
Buyers won’t visit your website to buy
Buyers do not have to be humans: agents instead
Google to keep users > less traffic for us.
Google’s announcement is a bunch of Shell code samples. Not useful.
I am giving you the first steps to take towards Agentic Commerce:
Agentic Product discovery using Structured data.
All with a little twist: you do not need perfect Schema on your website 😮
Ready? Let’s go!
Schema Can Get Too Complex
Tech SEO is the door to Agentic Commerce
One crucial part of Agentic Commerce (the future of SEO is Structured Data. More specifically: Product Schema. But it can get too complex…
Product Schema has to cope with:
Multiple regions
Different reviews apps
Multiple return policies
Different product types
Different shippings per product
Same code-base across multiple domains
I am working on it for a client, it is doable but boy is taking too long.
Product Schema implementation can get too complex (example in Shopify)
Let me show you other ways to still be relevant for Shopping enriched results without the perfect Schema. I am talking about fancy results like this:
Enriched results on Google SERP without perfect Schema
This merchant here does not have the perfect Schema.
Yet they enjoy the best enriched results.
The key is Merchant Center and Rendering.
Experiment 1: Shipping & Return Data
The example you just saw with enriched data, that page is missing the “right“ Schema:
No Schema with “shippingDetails“
No Schema with “hasMerchantReturnPolicy“
Yet, let’s look at the example again:
Shipping Details and Return Policy were not data present in the on-page Schema.
How come without the Schema the enriched results happen anyways?
They were actually implemented on Google Merchant Center instead
What about the reviews? Were they in the Schema?
Yes they were. No surprise, if you pass proper structured data, it will (likely) show on search results.
So I wanted to test if any merchant will enjoy enriched results for reviews without having it implemented on page Schema. Let’s check it out…
Experiment 2: Reviews data
It turns out that Google can show reviews from a product without that product page having that data in their on-page Schema 🫢
How come the review data is being shown on Search results without being on Schema?
I believe it comes down to rendering + reviews aggregators: the product reviews, despite being JS dependent, are present in the rendered version stored by Google for the index and are being sent to Google via a 3rd party aggregator. Here is how that review piece is rendered:
Rendered review makes it to be shown on search results (without on-page Schema)
I would still recommend to avoid Javascript rendered content/HTML, try to serve as much as possible server-rendered.
🤷♂ Insider Look: most of review systems (Trustpilot, Yotpo, etc) have plugins and apps that can be embedded on your website to show the reviews. At some point Google also needs that type of information to keep users engaged while searching, so Google makes the extra effort on running the JS and store that juicy user-generated content.
💁♂ SEO underrated tip: implement a strong review collection system. Reviews are the highest form of trust: users bought the product and leave content about it to help other users. Reviews alone make the difference in clicks and conversions.
Experiment 3 - Agentic Commerce V1 (case study)
I took a client that had missing or broken Product Schema without enriched results. My premise is to have all relevant product data perfectly set so when the time comes to implement my clients UCP we are already one step ahead.
I removed the Schema issues, left the most basic product info: Product data, Price & Availability.
I also added AggregateRating in the Schema as this data I could not retrieve from anywhere else. Google can retrieve reviews but cannot make an calculation for average rate (at least has not done it while my experiment).
Fixing Schema issues
I added enhanced product data in the Google Merchant Feed (shipping and returns) per each product using a simple CSV file. For example:
Field: [shipping]
Value: [shipping_country: US, shipping_price: 9.5]
Field: [return_policy_label]
Value: [standard_30_day_returns]
Sample of product data implemented in the Google Merchant Center feed
Experiment Results
Broken Schema gone
Basic Schema correctly implemented (and showing)
Merchant listings (Free listings) transactional traffic increased by 40% daily average
Traffic from high transactional-intent traffic increased
🤖 Disclaimer: All this being said I do not want you to forget about Structured Data, I am only giving you other ways to speed up the process of implementing it with faster results. In fact, nailing your structured data across all systems will be an asset for your search visibility and revenue.
How to prepare for Agentic Commerce V1
Implement Schema
Implement Merchant data
Implement Product reviews
Render all product content on server
Collect reviews regularly
Aligning all the data across all systems used by Google is not optional anymore.
Recommended Reads
🔎 What UCP Means for Ecommerce SEO
[Aleyda Solis’ Blog]
🔎 Embedded Checkout
[Google Developer Documentation]
🔎 Agent Payment Protocol
[Agent Payments Protocol Documentation]
🔎 The Agentic Commerce Protocol
[Shopify Blog]
This post went a bit longer than expected and cannot really explain all of it here. If you want me to review you current status for the next Generation of SEO (Agentic Commerce) let’s chat here: Agentic Commerce Check
Until next time 👋
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