Ulta Beauty Opens Inventory to Google's Agentic Commerce Layer

Ulta Beauty is going all-in on Google's AI stack. The beauty retailer announced this week that its full assortment will become shoppable inside Google's AI Mode in search and the Gemini app within the next month, while a new on-site assistant called Ulta AI — powered by Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience — is already live on its website and heading to its app.

What the Integration Actually Covers

On the Google side, the deal means consumers browsing inside Gemini or AI Mode can receive Ulta-specific product recommendations, run side-by-side comparisons, and complete purchases without leaving the Google interface. That's a meaningfully deeper commerce integration than, say, Walmart's January Gemini deal, where Retail Dive reports users still hand off to Walmart's own checkout environment. Ulta appears to be allowing the transaction to close inside Google's surface — a distinction that matters enormously for attribution, margin, and first-party data capture.

On the owned-and-operated side, Ulta AI is positioned as a digital analog to in-store beauty advisors: surfacing recommendations, guiding discovery, and narrowing consideration sets. CEO Kecia Steelman flagged at NRF in January that the retailer's loyalty data could power more predictive personalization — Ulta AI is evidently the execution vehicle for that ambition.

Google Is Assembling a Retailer Coalition

Ulta joins Walmart, Target, and Etsy in plugging inventory into Google's and OpenAI's AI surfaces this year, but the Ulta deal underscores Google's specific push to lock in category-dominant specialty retailers. Beauty is trust- and discovery-driven — exactly the kind of high-consideration, high-frequency category where an AI assistant can compress the funnel and where Google benefits from being the default commerce agent rather than just the top-of-funnel search engine.

For brands selling through Ulta, this raises immediate questions about visibility within AI-generated recommendation sets: who controls the ranking logic, what role media spend plays in surfacing SKUs, and whether Ulta's retail media network gets wired into the Gemini recommendation layer at all. None of that has been disclosed publicly yet.

Why It Matters

Agentic commerce — where an AI completes a transaction on behalf of a consumer — is rapidly moving from concept to live infrastructure, and Ulta's dual move accelerates the timeline for the whole industry. Retailers that delay integrating their product catalogs into AI surfaces risk ceding discovery to competitors who are already there. For retail media, the more pressing question is whether on-platform sponsored placements will carry over into AI-generated results, or whether a new ad format and buying mechanism will need to be negotiated with Google entirely. The brands and agencies that figure that out first will have a significant early-mover advantage.