Walmart Connect was the only name ChatGPT and Gemini kept coming back to, showing up in 4 of the 6 answers we ran for "retail media platforms" on 2026-08-06. No other product was named in more than three, so when a buyer asks either assistant for the best retail media platform, Walmart Connect is the closest thing to a default. It is not a runaway, though: it appears in two thirds of the answers, not all of them.
CitrusAd was the second most-named platform, appearing in 3 of the 6 retail media answers from ChatGPT and Gemini. After that the field flattens: seven products tie at 2 of 6 (Amazon, Amazon Ads, Amazon Advertising, Instacart, Instacart Ads, Kroger and Target), and 20 more products were each named in a single answer. In all, 29 distinct products surfaced across the six questions, and 20 of those 29 (69%) were named in only one answer.
One note on how we counted, because it matters here. The assistants named the same brands under different labels, and we kept each label as it was said instead of merging them. Amazon's retail media appears three ways: "Amazon" (2 of 6), "Amazon Ads" (2 of 6) and "Amazon Advertising" (2 of 6). Criteo appears three ways too: "Criteo," "Criteo Commerce Max" and "Criteo Retail Media," each 1 of 6. Instacart splits into "Instacart" (2 of 6) and "Instacart Ads" (2 of 6), and Walmart into "Walmart Connect" (4 of 6) and "Walmart" (1 of 6). We did not add these together, since the data shows no combined figure, but counting every label the Amazon brand appears in 5 of the 6 answers and the Walmart brand in 5 of the 6. The single most-named exact label is still Walmart Connect at 4 of 6.
How the shortlist changed from question to question
The six questions read almost the same in plain English, but the answers did not, and this is the part worth studying. Of the 29 products named, 20 appeared in exactly one of the six answers, so the wording of the question, not a stable "top platforms" list, decided most of what got said.
The bare "best retail media platforms" question returned eight first-party retail networks: Amazon, Walmart Connect, Instacart, eBay, Etsy, Kroger, Albertsons and Target. Three of those, eBay, Etsy and Albertsons, appeared in this answer and nowhere else in the six. The generic "best" question is where the marketplace and grocery names cluster.
Adding one word, "free," swapped nearly the entire cast. "Best free retail media platforms" returned Criteo, CitrusAd, Amazon Ads, Mirakl Ads, Sovendus, Microsoft Retail Media, Webloyalty and Reetmo. Six of those eight (Criteo, Mirakl Ads, Sovendus, Microsoft Retail Media, Webloyalty and Reetmo) showed up in this answer and no other, and there is no exact-label overlap with the bare "best" answer at all. The retailers dropped out and ad-tech vendors took their place.
"Most affordable retail media platforms" then pulled the retailers back. It returned Criteo Retail Media, CitrusAd, Amazon Advertising, Amazon, Walmart, Target, Kroger and Instacart: the grocery and marketplace names from the "best" answer, alongside CitrusAd and a Criteo label, the two ad-tech brands it shares with the "free" answer. "Criteo Retail Media" and "Walmart" were unique to this answer. So "free" and "affordable," which a buyer might treat as one idea, produced two different shortlists.
The remaining three questions each had their own tail. "What retail media platforms should I use" surfaced a cluster of Amazon PPC tools that appeared nowhere else: Ad Badger, Scale Insights, Sellozo and Adtomic. "Retail media platforms recommendations" was the only place Moloco Retail Media Platform, Criteo Commerce Max, PromoteIQ, Pacvue Platform and Orange Apron Media came up. And "best retail media platforms for small teams" added no new names at all, returning Amazon Advertising, Walmart Connect and Instacart Ads, all three of which appear in other answers, so "for small teams" surfaced no small-team-specific tool.
The source map: who fed the answers
Across the six retail media answers, the most-cited domains were criteo.com, gartner.com and placer.ai, each sitting behind 5 of the 6 answers, followed by koddi.com and tinuiti.com at 4 of 6. Those are analyst pages, agency roundups and vendor blogs. Eighteen distinct domains fed the six answers in total.
Community threads were a real but minor input here. Reddit was cited behind 3 of the 6 retail media answers and Quora behind 1 of 6. That is a smaller community share than we see in many software categories, where Reddit alone can sit behind most answers. In this category the roundup and analyst pages did the heavy lifting.
Review directories barely registered. G2 and TrustRadius were each cited exactly once, both on the "best free" question, and Capterra did not appear at all across the six answers. If you are a retail media vendor trusting your G2 profile to carry your AI visibility, this data says it is not what ChatGPT and Gemini were reading.
The key insight sits in the vendor-owned pages. Criteo's own site, criteo.com, was a joint most-cited source at 5 of 6 answers, and Criteo was named as a product in 3 answers across its three labels. Amazon's own advertising.amazon.com fed 3 of 6 answers, and the Amazon brand was named in 5 of 6. Moloco's own moloco.com fed 3 of 6 answers, and Moloco Retail Media Platform was named in 1. In each case the vendor's own published pages were part of what the assistant read before naming that vendor.
The link is not automatic, though. Koddi (koddi.com, 4 of 6), Tinuiti (tinuiti.com, 4 of 6), Improvado (improvado.io, 3 of 6) and Topsort (topsort.com, 3 of 6) were all cited heavily, yet none of those four brands was named as a product in any of the six answers. Being read as a source and being named as a product are different outcomes, and for these four the first happened without the second.
What a retail media vendor would do to get named
Get into these exact pages. Walmart Connect leads the naming at 4 of 6 even though Walmart's own ad domain is not in the source list at all: it gets named because the third-party roundups (gartner.com, tinuiti.com, criteo.com, koddi.com, placer.ai) already carry it. That is one route onto the list, being included in the pages the assistants read.
The second route is the one you control, and Criteo, Amazon and Moloco show it: publish your own pages worth citing. Each of those three had its own domain among the sources and its product in the answers. You cannot make Gartner add you this week, but you can publish the comparison or category page that becomes a citation, the way criteo.com did to sit behind 5 of 6 answers.
Either way, the source list decided the outcome, not market share. The measurement never asked which retail media platform is biggest; it recorded which ones ChatGPT and Gemini named, and those names tracked the 18 domains that fed the answers. A vendor absent from those pages was absent from the answers, whatever its real revenue.
The full list, counted
| Product | Named in | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Walmart Connect | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| CitrusAd | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| Amazon | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Amazon Ads | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Amazon Advertising | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Instacart | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Instacart Ads | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Kroger | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Target | 2 of 6 | 33% |
Share is the percentage of the 6 retail media answers each product was named in. Amazon and Instacart each appear under more than one label above, and Criteo's three labels each landed at 1 of 6, just below this cut. We left the labels separate on purpose: merging them would invent a combined number the measurement never produced.
Where Glotier fits
Glotier does not sell a retail media platform, so we are correctly absent from all six of these answers, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. We built the tool that ran this measurement. What you just read, the named products, the six-question fan-out and the 18 source domains, is exactly the report we generate for a customer's own category.
If you market one of the products above, or one that should be on this list and is not, the useful next step is to run your own category the same way. The check is free, takes about a minute and needs no account, and it will tell you which of these six questions name you today, and which pages you would need to be on to change that.