Paid placement inside AI answers, for high-intent shoppers.
Talk to us about your sector →Ripple18 runs Generative Engine Advertising (GEA) — AI Engine Ads — for eCommerce and retail brands whose highest-intent shoppers increasingly ask an AI assistant to shortlist or compare products before they ever reach a search results page. GEA buys placement inside the same generative engines GEO earns visibility in organically: ChatGPT Ads, Microsoft's Copilot/Bing ads, Google Ads on AI Overviews and Gemini surfaces, and X Ads on Grok. Creative is produced once and adapted across all four, so a retail campaign launches as one coherent programme rather than four disconnected builds, and GTM Server-Side tagging plus a Looker Studio dashboard give one attribution view across spend, citations, assisted conversions and share-of-AI-voice — a meaningful defence against rising paid acquisition cost. GEA is available from our £1,500-a-month Starter retainer, excluding ad spend, or bundled into the £3,500-a-month Growth retainer.
What challenges does ecommerce & retail face?
Seasonality and peak windows
Demand swings hard around sales events and seasons. Flat, always-on budgets waste spend in the troughs and under-invest at the peaks.
Thin, duplicate product-page SEO
Large catalogues generate near-identical pages that search engines struggle to rank — and that AI answers ignore.
Owned store vs. marketplace tension
Amazon and eBay drive volume but erode margin and data. Balancing marketplace reach with a profitable owned channel is a constant trade-off.
Rising acquisition cost
Paid CAC creeps up every year. Without CRO and retention, every new customer costs more than the last.
What's included in ai engine ads (gea) for ecommerce & retail?
ChatGPT Ads
OpenAI's in-answer ad placements inside ChatGPT conversations — creative shown alongside or within a generated answer, targeted to the intent behind the chat itself rather than a static keyword list.
Microsoft Ads
Copilot and Bing's AI-powered results carry Microsoft's own ad placements — search-intent targeting extended into Copilot's conversational and side-panel surfaces across Windows, Edge and Bing.
Google Ads
Google's AI Overviews and Gemini surfaces now carry paid placements alongside organic and AI-generated answers — the same Google Ads infrastructure your search campaigns already run on, extended into AI-first results.
X Ads
Grok's answers inside X carry X's own ad inventory — promoted placements reaching an audience already inside a conversational AI surface, alongside X's existing timeline and search ad formats.
Frequently asked
What is Generative Engine Advertising (GEA)?
GEA is paid advertising that runs inside generative AI engines themselves — ChatGPT Ads, Microsoft's Copilot/Bing ads, Google Ads on AI Overviews and Gemini surfaces, and X Ads on Grok — rather than on a classic search results page. It's the paid counterpart to GEO, which earns AI visibility organically.
How is GEA different from GEO?
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) earns citations in AI answers through content, structure and authority, with no media spend. GEA buys placement inside those same AI engines directly. We run them as one connected programme: GEO earns AI visibility; GEA buys it.
AI Engine Ads (GEA) for eCommerce & Retail
eCommerce & Retail
eCommerce & Retail — how Ripple18 approaches this sector.
ServiceAI Engine Ads (GEA)
Paid ads inside ChatGPT, Copilot, Google AI and X — one pipeline, one dashboard.
Case studySee an organic-growth programme for a retailer
Doubled organic revenue in three quarters through technical SEO and content.