Understand any stock in simple English
Enter a ticker to learn what the company does and how it makes money.
Criteo S.A.
Criteo runs digital advertising technology that helps retailers and brands show targeted ads and sponsored product listings to shoppers.
Criteo is an advertising technology company. It sits between retailers who have shoppers on their websites and apps, and the brands that want to sell those shoppers more stuff. When you browse a store's website and later see that store's ad following you around the internet, Criteo is often the machinery making that happen.
The business works like this: a retailer lets Criteo place ads on its site and across the web, and Criteo uses shopping data to target the right person. Brands pay for those ads, and Criteo keeps a cut of the money while passing the rest to the retailer. Its big bet in recent years has been "retail media" — sponsored product listings on retailer sites, the kind of ads that now make up a fast-growing chunk of digital advertising. Criteo also runs a performance media business that helps advertisers find new customers beyond just retargeting people who already visited. That shift matters because plain retargeting — following you around with an ad for shoes you already looked at — has gotten harder. Apple's privacy changes and the slow death of third-party cookies in browsers like Chrome weakened the old tracking playbook. Retailers' own first-party shopping data is more valuable than ever, which is why Criteo has leaned into retail media and signed up big retail partners to power their ad networks. Competition is fierce, though: Amazon dominates retail media, and Google and Meta Platforms loom over digital advertising generally.
Criteo is headquartered in Paris, and it makes most of its money in the Americas and Europe. The core question for investors is whether retail media growth can outrun the decline in its older retargeting business. It is a profitable, cash-generating company, but it operates in a market where the biggest platforms hold most of the cards.
Saved answer · last researched 14 Nov 2026