Visa is rolling out a foundational framework for agentic commerce. Called the Trusted Agent Protocol, Visa says it enables secure communication between AI agents and merchants during every step of an agentic AI e-commerce transaction. The launch comes as AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail websites has grown by more than 4,700 percent this past year, Visa says, citing Adobe Research data. Visa is making the protocol, which was developed in concert with Cloudflare, available to others using an “open, ecosystem-wide approach” that aligns with global standards bodies including the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), OpenID Foundation and EMVCo.

Visa’s new protocol is a security framework “designed to solve one of the thorniest problems emerging in artificial intelligence-powered commerce: how retailers can tell the difference between legitimate AI shopping assistants and the malicious bots that plague their websites,” reports VentureBeat.

“The protocol enables merchants to cryptographically verify that an AI agent browsing their site is authorized and trustworthy, rather than a bot designed to scrape pricing data, test stolen credit cards, or carry out other fraudulent activities,” VB adds. The explosive growth in agentic commerce has “created an acute challenge for merchants whose existing bot detection systems — designed to block automated traffic — now risk accidentally blocking legitimate AI shoppers along with bad actors.”

The move comes at an inflection point for agentic commerce. Visa says that 85 percent of shoppers using AI assistants are reporting improved experiences.

“We believe the entire payments ecosystem has a responsibility to ensure sellers trust AI agents with the same confidence they place in their most valued customers and networks,” Visa Chief Product and Strategy Officer Jack Forestell says in PYMNTS.

Visa notes it is “working closely with our ecosystem partners to ensure that Trusted Agent Protocol will complement other recently announced protocols like the Agentic Commerce Protocol and are collaborating with Coinbase to align on interoperability with x402.”

The Trusted Agent Protocol is available in the Visa Developer Center and GitHub.

“This is about more than technology — it’s about collaboration between tech innovators and payments leaders who know what it takes to deliver reliability and adoption at scale,” suggests Worldpay Chief Product Officer Cindy Turner, per PYMNTS. Worldpay worked closely with Visa and Cloudflare to develop the technology.

Related:
Visa Introduces Trusted Agent Protocol: An Ecosystem-Led Framework for AI Commerce, Press Release, 10/14/25
Cloudflare Collaborates with Leading Payments Companies to Secure and Enable Agentic Commerce, Press Release, 10/14/25