Square is launching its new ChatGPT app and Claude plugin, allowing consumers to discover restaurants and place orders directly within these AI platforms, allowing restaurants to in turn take orders from users and their AI agents without any technical input.
Even more beneficial for businesses, Square processes these AI-driven transactions without charging the traditional marketplace commissions that have historically plagued the food and beverage sector.
However, Square still charges typical online booking fees 3.3% plus $0.30 or 2.9% or 2.9% plus $0.30 for merchants subscribing to the Square Plus and Square Premium plans.
The system pulls directly from the Square catalog, dynamically mapping items, prices, compound modifiers, and stock availability, so autonomous agents never display out-of-stock inventory.
For enterprise testing and deployment verification, operators can manually verify their digital footprint "@" Icon to run the Custom Cash App plugin directly within ChatGPT or integrate it via the Claude extension directory.
Depending on the specific AI tool configuration, customers can either complete payment within the chat window through the Order via Cash App, or they will be seamlessly redirected to the merchant’s standard online ordering landing page with their selected items and modifiers already in the cart.
A more affordable online ordering system for restaurants
To understand the significance of the square move, you need to look at the math that restaurant owners will face in 2026. Third-party delivery and ordering apps have fundamentally changed the economics of the restaurant industry.
Currently, the major players—DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub—charge restaurants heavily for visibility and fulfillment. These exorbitant rates exist primarily because delivery aggregators combine the logistics costs of gig-worker delivery fleets, platform marketing, and search placement into a single revenue sharing model.
According to the latest pricing structures, DoorDash restaurants receive a 15% commission for the “Basic” delivery level, which rises to 25% for “Plus” and 30% for the top-tier “Premier” visibility plan. Even pickup orders carry a 6% market fee.
Uber Eats similarly specifies standard delivery market fees of 20% to 30% at the “Lite” level for premium placement, pick-up orders up to 10% unless in-store pricing is strictly confirmed.
Grubhub reflect these rates by charging 5% to 20% of the total order value depending on the marketing and delivery package selected.
In addition to these market commissions, the platforms still charge their own payment processing fees – usually around 2.5% – 3.05% and a fixed amount of one cent per order.
For an independent restaurant that can only make 3% to 9% net profit on a good day, handing over a 25% or 30% commission on a $40 digital order is essentially cooking at a loss.
Square’s new integration specifically targets this pain point. By tapping into Square’s ChatGPT and Claude integrations, eligible sellers are automatically selected with no additional setup, no new APIs to set up, and best of all, zero additional marketplace fees.
A restaurant discovered through an AI agent pays only Square’s standard online transaction processing fee (which is typically about 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction on the standard plan, not including the monthly market commission) instead of giving the delivery aggregator a 30% discount.
Unlike delivery aggregators, Square’s payment model does not subsidize the driver network locally. Instead, if an AI-generated order requires delivery, Square uses a white-label dispatch network that charges a flat courier fee (often around $7-$10 depending on distance) rather than taxing a percentage of the total cart size. Restaurants can choose to absorb this flat delivery cost or pass it on directly to the customer, completely preserving their dining margins.
The result is an AI-powered discovery channel that acts as a direct, first-party order.
How the technology works
Square’s new integration is currently live for US-based Food & Beverage sellers with an activated Square Online Order profile.
The system runs completely in the background. Sellers manage discoverability and business information—menus, hours, stock levels, and pricing—directly through the available Square Dashboard.
When a consumer makes a request to ChatGPT or Claude, such as “Find a specialty coffee shop near me and order me a bag of home roast,” the AI analyzes the real-time data provided by Meydan.
Customers can view results, make their selections and finalize their purchase using the Order with Cash App without leaving the chat interface.
The transaction is then immediately routed into the merchant’s existing transaction flow, appearing on their Square Point of Sale (POS) and Kitchen Display System as an order in-store or directly on their website.
To help operators track revenue in this new channel, order origination is clearly listed in Square’s backend report as an AI integration.
“Consumer behaviors and preferences are constantly evolving, and business owners can easily find themselves playing an impossible game to keep up with,” said Morgan Kuntze, Head of Global Partnerships at Block, Square’s parent company. “Our investment in agent trading is designed to free up that responsibility by giving operators time, helping them connect with customers in their communities, and keeping them at the cutting edge of the industry. Modern commerce is moving fast, and we’re building Square to help sellers appear wherever customers go.”
Focusing on technology to allow restaurants to focus on food
In a pilot phase, Square partnered with Partners Coffee, a Brooklyn-based specialty coffee brand, to refine how AI-powered discovery translates into the real world. For operators like Partners Coffee, the goal isn’t necessarily to become a hyper-digitized storefront, but to use digital efficiencies to preserve the physical experience of the cafe.
"We don’t see coffee as a transaction. For us, it’s an opportunity to pause and reflect, a chance to relax, and a catalyst for connection." Andrew Costaris, Vice President of Digital at Partners Coffee, noted in a statement provided by Square to VentureBeat. "The last thing we want is for our technology solutions to work against this mission or complicate the customer experience. With agent trading and artificial intelligence tools running in the background, we ensure that our business is digitally discovered and efficiency is continuously increased, while our customers can continue to enjoy the specialty coffee environment in the first place."
An AI-driven e-commerce ecosystem
The integration with ChatGPT and Claude is just the first step in Square’s broader agent commerce strategy. The stakes are high: industry data cited by the company shows that more than 42% of consumers now use AI tools to help with shopping tasks such as product discovery and comparison. By 2030, analysts predict that buyer agents could account for nearly $385 billion in U.S. e-commerce spending.
Most SMBs don’t have the developer teams or budgets required to build custom integrations for every new chatbot, voice assistant, or AI hardware device that hits the market. Square wants to serve as a universal connective tissue.
To that end, the company announced that it is actively working with Amazon to engage sellers in Alexa+ voice commerce experiences. In addition, Square participates in key regulatory and standards groups, including the AAIF Agentic Commerce Working Group and the W3C Web Payments Working Group, to shape the interoperability of AI agents and commerce platforms at scale.
Of particular note is Square’s ongoing collaboration with Google to co-develop the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) specification for local food ordering. This open standard is designed to enable agents and systems to communicate seamlessly throughout the entire trade journey. On Google’s end, UCP enables discovery and verification across its views on artificial intelligence in Search and the Gemini app. As the UCP protocol expands globally, Square plans to roll out these capabilities so that its sellers are front and center.
For the more than 4.5 million sellers who currently use Square, the promise of agent commerce is clear: a way to capture the next generation of internet traffic without sacrificing the profit margins required to keep their doors open. If Square can successfully route AI orders directly to local businesses’ POS systems, avoiding the 30% fee charged by delivery collectors, it could mark big changes in how the restaurant industry navigates today’s digital economy.
