India : Criteo (NASDAQ: CRTO) today reported third quarter 2026 earnings, highlighting progress in its strategy to make Commerce Intelligence central to how advertisers reach consumers and retailers grow their media businesses. Momentum in CTV and ChatGPT Ads underscores how Criteo is extending its commerce data and AI decisioning into additional shopping channels to connect discovery with purchase.
Alongside this expansion, Criteo is simplifying access through self-service and agency workflows, with a continued focus on driving advertiser adoption, improving productivity and lowering cost to serve.
Proven Cross-Channel Performance
Criteo continues to navigate headwinds from the previously communicated reduced spending by several large performance media clients and client scope reductions from two retail media clients. Despite these challenges, the company is making encouraging progress across channels like CTV, AI platforms and social.
Specific highlights include:
• CTV: Today, Criteo announced the global expansion of its Performance CTV offering, building on early U.S. traction. The rollout will begin in Brazil and Mexico by the end of 2026, followed by Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Australia, and select additional markets in 2027.
o The company’s opportunity pipeline has doubled over the past three months, as advertiser demand and repeat spending grow.
• ChatGPT Ads: Criteo’s OpenAI integration has expanded from seven to 89 countries in just three months, and average spend per client is increasing modestly. Its rich commerce audiences remain a key differentiator, with its Prompt Smart Ads capability tailoring messaging to the intent people express in their conversations.
o A Turkish Airlines campaign harnessing Prompt Smart Ads generated an 183% increase in site landings from ChatGPT Ads and 15% more time per visit.
• Social: In Q3, media spend and the number of campaigns each grew approximately 20% year-over-year, demonstrating how Commerce Intelligence can drive performance beyond the open web.
Diversified Retail Media Business
As consumers increasingly use AI assistants, e-commerce traffic across Criteo’s retail partners continues to grow, highlighting that retailers remain central to product discovery and purchase. To ensure success in this evolving environment, Criteo is expanding the tools that help retailers make their sites more relevant to shoppers and unlock new revenue opportunities.
Specific highlights include:
• Retailer AI assistants: Following its launch with Albertsons last quarter, Criteo is working to bring sponsored recommendations to additional retailer AI assistants, including THG Ingenuity in the UK, creating new revenue opportunities within conversational shopping.
• Page Intelligence: To help retailers adapt to AI-driven product discovery, Criteo is testing Page Intelligence with one of its largest retail partners. The offering combines merchandising, advertising and shopper engagement to improve site relevance and monetization while maintaining retailer control over product selection and ranking.
• Auction-based display: Auction-based display is now live with more than 95 retailers—twice the number at the start of the year—and auctions account for more than half of onsite display campaigns. Overall, Criteo is on track to grow display spend by close to 50% this year.
• Retailer relationships: Four of Criteo’s largest retail partners recently renewed multi-year agreements. In addition, DOUGLAS, Flaconi and Metro are preparing to expand into additional markets, while new partners include Notino in EMEA, El Puerto de Liverpool in Mexico, ONIGO in Japan, Adore Beauty in Australia, and PayU in India.
Focus on MCP and Self-Service
Criteo is bringing its capabilities into the tools and workflows advertisers already use and driving self-service offerings, making it easier for clients adopt its technology and manage campaigns.
Highlights include:
• MCP and agency workflows: All major agency holding companies are testing Criteo’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) capabilities, which connect Criteo’s reporting, audience creation and select campaign operations solutions to agencies’ own AI tools.
• Agency Growth: Agency spend has increased by 5% year-to-date, signaling a growing desire to combine Criteo’s commerce data with agency assets and to co-develop agentic capabilities.
• Self-Service: GO self-service campaigns now serve approximately one-third of Commerce Growth customers and represent about 10% of Commerce Growth revenue. Building on learnings from successful activations, Criteo is prioritizing the use of agentic tools to automate key onboarding steps, instead of standalone self-registration. From there, clients can manage and optimize campaigns themselves. As more campaigns move into these self-service workflows, Criteo is improving client productivity and lowering its cost to serve.
Q3 2026 Facts & Figures
• Revenue: $416 million, with $240 million in Contribution ex-TAC (net revenue).
• Media spend: $1.2 billion, up 9% year-over-year.
• Retail Media Contribution ex-TAC: $51 million, with underlying growth of 10% year-over-year, excluding the two previously announced retailer scope reductions.
• Performance Media Contribution ex-TAC: $189 million, reflecting continued headwinds from several large enterprise clients, while the broader client base remained resilient.
• Adjusted EBITDA: $65 million.
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