For years, performance marketers have been trained to capture intent once it becomes explicit through a query, click, product view, or conversion signal. That model still matters. But in AI-driven environments, consumers often begin somewhere much less defined. They start with a goal, a scenario, or even a feeling before they know what category, product, or brand to search for.
Instead of searching for “best running shoes,” they might ask, “I want to get healthier, where do I start?” Instead of searching for a portable speaker, they may say “I’m hosting friends for an outside party and want a super easy setup.” Instead of searching for HEPA-filtered vacuum, their prompt might be “what are the top three things I can do to make my apartment safer for my kid’s allergies.” These are not traditional product queries, but rather expressions of intent taking shape.
As intent emerges through conversation, the pathways consumers follow to discover products and brands are changing as well.
Consumer journeys are becoming more fragmented, conversational, and AI-mediated. Discovery now happens across retailers, social, connected TV, the open web, and AI assistants that help consumers explore, decide, and act. AI is becoming a layer across this mix, bringing conversation, recommendations and decisioning into environments consumers only browsed, watched searched, or clicked.
This is the shift marketers need to understand today. AI is shrinking the distance between influence and conversion. Discovery is no longer separate from performance, but is instead becoming a measurable, outcome-driven opportunity to shape decisions before intent is fully formed.
And increasingly, the question for brands is not only whether they can buy attention, but whether they can earn authority at the moment an AI system decides what belongs in an answer.
Influence Moves Upstream
Historically, performance marketing has focused on moments of action, when intent is clear, and conversion is within reach. There is no need to throw away that playbook. Search, retargeting, sponsored products, and lower-funnel optimization will continue to matter.
But the traditional performance model misses an important part of the journey: the earlier moments when people are exploring, asking questions, and narrowing options before they know exactly what they want. That has largely been the domain of brand marketing, tied to an upper-funnel budget and measurement system.
AI is changing that separation between lower and upper funnel.
In AI-driven environments, those earlier moments are no longer vague or invisible. These interactions can reveal goals, preferences, trade-offs, and evolving evaluation. We may not yet have a product in mind, but the conversation can reveal what we are trying to accomplish. EMARKETER recently reported nearly half of shoppers say they would consider a different brand or product if an AI assistant recommended an alternative, confirming that influence is moving upstream.
This evolution upends the traditional Think, Feel, Do messaging framework from a one-way marketer-to-consumer conversation to a bi-directional one, mediated by AI assistants. People naturally move from thoughts and emotions to actions, so effective marketing messages must address all three framework stages. What changes with AI is that these stages are moving closer together, and becoming two-way, as think, feel, and do can unfold inside a single conversation.
That is why AI-assisted discovery is so powerful. It does not just intercept demand. It helps create it.
From Keywords to Conversations
The biggest mistake marketers can make is to treat AI environments as performance or branding with a new interface.
Search was built around declared intent where organic results were the source of truth. A marketer could override this truth by bidding against a keyword. The signal was simple and the outcome was predictable.
AI environments work differently. A clean commercial signal isn’t always provided. Every conversation is unique and unpredictable based on what the model knows about individual users and the direction of the conversation. With each response, the model synthesizes an answer based on what it believes to be useful, relevant, and trustworthy. While paid placements are getting introduced into these environments, there’s an opportunity to learn more about why answers are returned and how to optimize them.
Moving Toward an Integrated Organic and Paid Approach
This is where paid discovery and organic discovery begin to converge.
Paid discovery gives brands a way to show up in AI-mediated environments, but it must be relevance-first, and utility-rich. If that paid experience makes the answer worse, it weakens consumer trust. And AI platforms will quickly learn to avoid those ads to preserve positive interactions with users. Organic discovery, often referred to as Generative Engine Optimization or GEO, improves the underlying product and brand representations that help models understand when a brand deserves to be included even without paid placement.
The future of performance isn’t about paid versus organic. It is paid and organic reinforcing each other around the same goal of helping brands and products become useful, trusted, and cited when consumers work with an agent to decide what matters.
Trust Becomes the New Performance Constraint
AI assistants are designed to be helpful. That is their power, and it is also their risk.
When a consumer asks for help, models will try to provide a confident answer. In many cases, this creates utility. AI can help people discover products we didn’t know existed, compare other options more easily, understand trade-offs, and make smarter decisions.
A model’s confidence can be limited without trusted commerce data. Its response can sound confident even when product data is incomplete, stale, or poorly structured. It can recommend things that are out of stock, misrepresent a feature, miss better alternatives, or over rely on information that was easy to crawl rather than the most accurate.
Advertising must inform the model, support the consumer or agents’ goal, and preserve the trust of the interaction. A brand wins by providing useful, verifiable, and contextually relevant evidence for why it belongs in the answer.
The next advertising era will reward brands that can make themselves understandable to AI and useful to consumers at the same time.
Making Discovery Actionable
To influence consumers earlier in the journey, marketers need more than last-click signals. They need visibility into how intent forms across exploration, comparison, evaluation, and action. They need to understand not just what people bought, or what product they viewed, but what problem they were trying to solve, what they considered, what they rejected, and what led them to decide.
That’s where Criteo has an advantage. Our commerce intelligence is built on direct integrations across brands, retailers, and publishers, connecting shopper behavior to specific products and billions of interactions each day. This includes product searches, page views, and price-comparison behavior to add-to-cart activity, content engagement, chat prompts, creative exposure, and purchase outcomes across one trillion ecommerce transactions. That creates a strong foundation to understand beyond what people already bought, to what they may need now or next, what they are comparing, and where influence can still shape the outcome.
AI needs product and shopper data that is both available but understandable, as well as context that connects products to real world use cases, and feedback loops that continuously show whether answers led to useful outcomes.
The opportunity is to make discovery measurable and actionable across every environment where consumers explore products, including AI assistants and agentic interfaces. Criteo is already bringing this approach to market in ways that help marketers identify, activate, and shape discovery earlier in the journey.
Discovery Audiences
Launched in Criteo GO and expanding later this summer, Discovery Audiences are what makes this shift actionable. Powered by Criteo’s commerce intelligence, they help brands identify emerging demand before it declares itself. In that sense, they do more than extend upper-funnel reach. They help marketers identify new-to-brand and new-to-category audiences earlier in the journey, so they can invest more strategically and connect discovery more directly to performance.
Criteo’s OpenAI Integration
As ChatGPT ads expand, OpenAI is also creating a new and powerful environment where consumers are often still in the think and feel stages of the journey, exploring and forming preferences through conversation. Within that environment, Criteo is helping brands and agencies bring this new AI-native surface into a broader, cross-channel commerce strategy rather than treating it as a standalone test. It’s still early days, but momentum is building. More than 1,000 brands are already live through our integration, and we expanded access into Criteo GO so more marketers can test this emerging channel in a familiar, performance-driven way.
Conversational Ad Formats
Conversational ad formats are another new experience Criteo is piloting. Rather than treating an ad impression as a static placement, they transform existing performance moments into more engaging, discovery-driven experiences. Consumers can refine preferences, ask follow-up questions, and explore recommendations in real time, all within the personalized ad experience itself.
This allows brands to be present in those moments in a way that feels helpful to shoppers and accountable to outcomes. Every interaction brings more than engagement alone. It generates rich decision signals that feed back into Criteo’s commerce intelligence, continuously improving relevance, personalization, and performance optimization over time. For consumers in a travel mindset, it could mean the difference between booking the trip they originally planned and discovering a destination they had never even considered.
Taken together, these innovations point to a broader shift in the role of performance marketing. It is no longer limited to harvesting existing demand. It can engage consumers earlier, learn faster, and drive more across the full journey.
The Performance Opportunity Ahead
Early-stage discovery is becoming more addressable, more measurable, and more connected to outcomes than it has ever been before. As conversational interfaces become part of how consumers explore and decide, marketers have a chance to influence preference earlier, without giving up the accountability that performance marketing demands.
This is exactly the kind of shift Criteo is built for. As the neutral commerce intelligence platform connecting brands, retailers, agencies, and publishers, Criteo helps marketers translate AI-driven discovery into trusted, shoppable outcomes, combining commerce intelligence, media, and measurement to drive performance across the consumer journey.
