Questions · Discover

Does a valid UCP manifest mean agents can buy from me?

Not on its own. The manifest describes what you support. Whether an agent platform will use it also depends on that platform, and Google, for one, says not every feature in the specification is available on its surfaces yet.

Why it happens

The Universal Commerce Protocol starts with discovery. Before an agent platform checks out on a store over UCP, it fetches the manifest, picks a version both sides support, and reads which services and capabilities are on offer and where to reach them. A file it cannot parse, or one with no dated version or no services list, leaves it nothing to negotiate with.

What happens next is up to the platform. The likely outcome is that it treats the store as one without UCP and falls back to reading the storefront, which is why this is reported at medium severity rather than high: the store is harder to transact with, not invisible.

Having no manifest at all is not this finding, and Ottom does not report it as a defect. Whether a store has one is mostly decided by its platform, and a missing file is not something most merchants can or need to fix.

Run a free scan and find out which of these your store actually hits.