The strangest thing in Google's I/O announcement
Google built a checkout — Universal Cart closes the sale with Google Pay inside Google's own surfaces — and then declined to be the one selling. The brand stays merchant of record. UCP, the protocol that makes it work, is a free, open standard. There is no transaction cut. "Google built the payment counter and put someone else's name on the receipt." Busch's read: that isn't generosity, it's the whole strategy. A company doesn't build a checkout it refuses to profit from unless the profit was never in the transaction.
What Google has always sold
For twenty years Google has sold the surface where the decision gets made, by auction, and let the transaction happen on someone else's books under someone else's liability. The OTAs took the opposite trade — owning payments, cancellations, disputes, two decades of operational machinery. That machinery is their moat and their burden. Google has spent twenty years declining to pick up a corner.
The auction is already moving
In April, Google extended AI Max — its AI-powered ad system — to travel. Hotel ads, property promotions, and booking links became eligible to appear inside AI Overviews and AI Mode. The placement that used to sit beside the result now sits inside the answer. Busch notes nothing in Google's history suggests an agentic cart will be the first surface left without a paid layer above it.
Why placement beats commission
"Commission is a cut of what sells. Placement is a cut of what gets considered. The second is larger, and it is collected without ever touching a booking."
When an agent narrows a thousand options to three, the narrowing is the whole game. Whatever happens at checkout is downstream of a decision already made. Google charges for the decision and leaves checkout to partners who want it.
What it costs the buyer
Keyword bidding was a legible system — term, price, position, click. AI Max replaces that with intent-matching and a ranking the advertiser cannot inspect. "The auction is still running. You just can no longer see the board." And the field of bidders widens: when the agent's recommendation is the booking decision, everyone with a room becomes a potential advertiser. Finite surface, unbounded demand to appear on it — the condition under which auction prices climb.
The disintermediation worry asked whether Google would take a slice of the booking. Busch's punchline: it was the wrong worry, pointed at the wrong line on the invoice. Google doesn't want the booking. It wants the surface above it.