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Tech Article source ↗ source url updated Thu Jun 18 2026 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) — OpenAI developer docs

OpenAI’s developer documentation for the Agentic Commerce Protocol, the open spec behind Instant Checkout in ChatGPT — a concrete instance of agentic-commerce moving from demo to shipping standard.

Key facts

  • Who and what. OpenAI developed ACP; Stripe is the first payment service provider implementing the Delegated Payment Spec. “Building with the Agentic Commerce Protocol is open to all,” though Instant Checkout itself is “currently available to approved partners.”
  • Merchant keeps the business logic. ChatGPT collects buyer info and renders checkout in its own UI, but “the merchant performs validation, determines fulfillment options, calculates and charges sales tax … analyzes payment and risk signals on their own stack,” then “accepts or declines the order, and returns this state to ChatGPT.”
  • Not merchant of record. “OpenAI is not the merchant of record in the Agentic Commerce Protocol. Merchants are expected to bring their own PSP and handle payments.” Payment moves via a token OpenAI “passes on … to the merchant to complete the payment.”
  • Discovery = structured feeds. Merchants supply CSV/JSON product feeds that ChatGPT uses to “accurately surface their products in search and shopping experiences” — the agent reasons over feeds, not rendered web pages.

Cross-spoke note

The payments-rails contest around ACP (Visa Trusted Agent Protocol / Agent Score, Mastercard Agent Pay) is agentic-tooling-wiki territory (the agents and infrastructure); here the load-bearing fact is the discovery/visibility shift — products surface from feeds, not page rankings.

Tier

T1 — an official published specification, which is where the ladder puts official docs and specs regardless of who wrote them (same grade as llmstxt-spec). Re-graded up from T2 on 2026-08-04. Authoritative on the protocol, and still a single interested party in a contested standards space.

agentic-commerce · generative-engine-optimization · ai-search-shift · brand-depth-ai-recommendations · google-io-business-visibility

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