Criteo Q3 营收下滑 12%，扩张到零售媒体之外将是最艰难的挑战

Wednesday, November 4th, 2026 – 3:30 pm

Criteo has weathered considerable storms in its day, including a painful moment in March 2020 when its market cap bottomed out below $500 million.

But for a month now, Criteo’s market cap has hovered between $700 million and $750 million. So, can it pull off yet another turnaround?

The numbers from the company’s earnings report on Wednesday are … not great.

Criteo’s revenue decreased 12% year over year to $416 million. Its profit shrank from $40 million a year ago to $6 million in Q3 2026.

“This has been a challenging year,” Criteo CEO Michael Komasinski began the company’s investor call. “Our performance is not yet where I want it to be. The strength of our capabilities and the progress we’re making give me confidence in our direction.”

For Criteo, that “progress” mostly comes in the form of monetizing new media channels and formats. Criteo introduced CTV support last year. It’s also pursuing more LLM chatbot integrations after being the first ad tech vendor partner for ChatGPT. And it’s striking social media ecommerce integrations with the likes of TikTok Shop and Meta.

Old dog, new tricks

Criteo underwent a similar evolution many years ago, when it shifted from a retargeting business to retail media, which was one of the high-growth, high-optimism channels at the time (and also now).

But during its earnings call, investors pressed on whether retail media was a mature channel. They wondered if retail media growth slowing down is a result of Criteo customers requiring fewer client services. Or maybe it speaks to a general dearth of new retail media business opportunities to tap.

There could be something to those concerns, since Criteo seems to have more room for growth in non-retail channels.

CTV, AI platform advertising and social media integrations now represent 13% of spend for Criteo Commerce Growth, the company’s AI-based optimization product. That’s up from 6% a year ago.

CTV, LLM and social ads are also outpacing Criteo’s legacy display ad web targeting business, which is down year over year.

Can Criteo turn those emerging channels into real revenue pillars for years to come? That proposition remains unproven.

Always-on chatbot ads

On the LLM front, “ChatGPT has been our fastest growing partnership and channel for some time,” Komasinski said. But “fastest growing” comes with caveats. Percentage growth can be through the roof even if the line item went from a smidge above zero to a number that’s still quite small. We can’t really say either way. Criteo did not provide a hard revenue number for its LLM business.

Still, one important proof point for ChatGPT Ads growth is its market spread, Komasinski said. Criteo was in seven countries with ChatGPT a few months ago. Now it’s in 89 countries.

Plus, ChatGPT Ads traffic spends 15% per visit more on average, he said, which could help secure bigger budgets from brands who’ve seen success in early tests.

Thus far, Criteo has had “3,600 clients on and off the platform,” Komasinski said.

He explained the specific and strange wording of “on and off the platform,” which he said is because brands are mostly not “always-on” advertisers with ChatGPT (and other AI platforms). Looking ahead to Q4, Komasinski expects brands to run test campaigns over the holidays and deconstruct the results. Then they’ll probably come back and test again. How long it’ll take for those budgets to grow and become sticky is anyone’s guess, but Komasinski said he expects to see revenue growth ramping next year.

Meanwhile, third-party ad tech can’t complain about getting access to a trendy new platform.

“We’ve got a great position with a fast-growing channel, fast-growing partner who is introducing functionality at a rapid pace,” Komasinski said of the ChatGPT Ads partnership,

Social and CTV

Of the three new channels Criteo is prioritizing, social is the most mature. In the past year, social media spend on its platform and total social campaigns were up 20%.

But Criteo is still very early in working its way into CTV.

“It took us a little time to tune our bidder, build the right campaign structure (and) the right workflow” for streaming TV ads, Komasinski said.

Getting advertisers to approach TV as a performance or direct response-caliber media also requires a change in education and industry thinking, he said. But performance CTV is “a great fit for what we do,” he said, and the required mindset shift around CTV as a performance channel is “now coming to fruition.”

Becoming Apple-proof

For Criteo, there are other reasons to pursue these new media channels, even if it means starting from zero with whole new types of ad formats and workflow software.

Apple’s crackdown on ID infrastructure is a great motivator for moving beyond display and retail media, which require extensive cross-site tracking.

“We’re not currently seeing an impact from the Safari changes in iOS 27, supported by our longstanding investments in privacy-safe technology and durable addressability,” Komasinski said multiple times when addressing questions about Apple’s recent changes to WebKit and iOS.

Of course, iOS 27 gained little adoption during Criteo’s Q3, one investor pointed out. So the effects naturally haven’t arrived yet, right?

Komasinski declined to weigh in any further on WebKit specifics.

However, he added, “our channel diversification with social, OpenAI and CTV just puts us in a fundamentally different position today than where Criteo was a couple of years ago.”