Retail media is the fastest-growing advertising channel in the world. Retailers from Amazon to Currys are selling sponsored placements on their category pages, turning product search results into a pay-to-play battleground. Everyone knows this is happening. But nobody publishes exact numbers on how much of a retailer's digital shelf is actually paid placement versus organic ranking.
So we measured it. Over seven days, Crawlbot tracked 521,507 product appearances across 22 retailers in the UK and South Africa, recording the position, brand, price, and sponsored status of every product on every category page. Here is exactly what we found.
Across all 22 retailers and all product categories, 15,828 of 521,507 product appearances were sponsored. That is an overall sponsored rate of 3.0%.
But this headline average is misleading. It is misleading because most retailers in our tracking set have no retail media programme at all. They show zero sponsored products. The 3.0% figure is dragged down by sixteen retailers that contribute hundreds of thousands of organic-only appearances to the denominator.
When you isolate the six retailers that actually run sponsored product programmes, the picture changes dramatically. Among those six, the sponsored rate is far higher — and the variation between them is enormous.
Here are the six retailers where we detected sponsored product placements, ranked by their sponsored rate:
| Retailer | Sponsored | Total Appearances | Sponsored Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon UK | 2,842 | 25,465 | 11.2% |
| Amazon ZA | 6,165 | 65,704 | 9.4% |
| Takealot | 2,046 | 24,420 | 8.4% |
| Currys | 3,168 | 44,869 | 7.1% |
| Argos | 802 | 22,049 | 3.6% |
| John Lewis | 805 | 28,653 | 2.8% |
| 16 other retailers | 0 | 310,347 | 0% |
Amazon UK leads with more than 1 in 9 product appearances being a paid placement. That means for every nine organic products a shopper scrolls past on Amazon, there is at least one that a brand paid to put there. On Currys, it is roughly 1 in 14. On John Lewis, it is closer to 1 in 36.
The gap between Amazon and John Lewis is a fourfold difference in sponsored saturation. For brands allocating retail media budgets, this context matters enormously — the same ad spend buys a fundamentally different share of the page depending on which retailer you are advertising on.
The retailer data tells you where sponsored products appear. The brand data tells you who is paying for shelf space. We calculated the sponsored rate for each major brand across all retailers and categories:
| Brand | Sponsored Rate | Insight |
|---|---|---|
| Lenovo | 4.8% | Heaviest spender on retail media by far |
| Acer | 2.7% | Consistent mid-tier spend across retailers |
| HP | 2.7% | Similar profile to Acer, focused on Amazon + Currys |
| MSI | 2.0% | Concentrated in gaming categories |
| Xiaomi | 1.6% | Emerging player, spending to build visibility |
| Dell | 1.0% | Moderate spend, strong organic base |
| Samsung | 0.8% | Low spend relative to brand size |
| ASUS | 0.3% | Almost entirely organic visibility |
| Apple | 0.04% | 5 sponsored out of 15,070 appearances |
The Apple number is worth pausing on. Out of 15,070 product appearances across all retailers and categories in the measurement week, only 5 were sponsored. That is a sponsored rate of 0.04% — effectively zero. Apple does not pay for digital shelf visibility. It does not need to. The brand's organic demand, review scores, and sales velocity keep its products ranked at or near the top of every category page without any paid support.
Compare that to Lenovo at 4.8%. Lenovo is the heaviest retail media spender in our dataset, with nearly 1 in 20 of its appearances being paid. This is not necessarily a negative — Lenovo has an enormous product portfolio and is competing across many categories simultaneously — but it does mean that a meaningful portion of Lenovo's shelf visibility is rented, not owned.
These numbers have direct implications for how brands should think about their digital shelf strategy.
If you are an organic-only brand, you are competing against paid placements whether you know it or not. On Amazon UK, 1 in 9 listings is a paid competitor. On Currys, 1 in 14. Every sponsored product in the top positions is an organic product that got pushed down. If your product was naturally sitting in position 4 but two sponsored products are injected above it, you are now in position 6. Your organic ranking did not change, but your actual visibility did.
If you are NOT tracking sponsored vs. organic separately, your "market share" number is lying to you. A brand might report 15% share of voice overall. But if you decompose that into 10% organic and 5% sponsored, the picture changes entirely. One-third of that brand's visibility disappears the moment they reduce their retail media spend. The organic 10% is the brand's true, durable market position. The other 5% is rented shelf space that evaporates when the ad budget is cut.
Retail media ROI cannot be measured without organic context. If you are spending on sponsored placements on Currys but do not know your organic ranking, you cannot tell whether the ad spend is incremental or cannibalistic. If your product would have appeared in position 3 organically but you are paying for position 2, the marginal value of that sponsored placement is one position — probably not worth the cost. But without the organic baseline, you would never know.
Sixteen of the 22 retailers we track have zero sponsored products. In the UK, this includes Box, Very, Scan, Overclockers, Harvey Norman, AO, Costco, Laptops Direct, EE, and Ebuyer. In South Africa, it includes Game, Incredible Connection, ComputerMania, Makro, HiFi Corp, and Amazon ZA's non-sponsored categories.
For brands, these retailers represent pure-organic battlegrounds. There is no paid shortcut. Your position on the category page is determined entirely by your product fundamentals: sales velocity, review scores, stock levels, content quality, and pricing. If you are losing share of voice on Box or AO, the fix is not a bigger ad budget — it is a better product page, a more competitive price, or more customer reviews.
This also means that these retailers provide the cleanest signal of true brand strength. If your organic share of voice on Scan is 20%, that is a real, uncontaminated measure of how your brand stacks up in the market. No one is buying their way past you. No one is bidding you down. The number is pure.
Data was collected by Crawlbot's distributed scraping platform over seven consecutive days (24 February – 2 March 2026). We scraped category pages across 22 retailers in the UK and South Africa, covering laptops, gaming laptops, Chromebooks, monitors, gaming monitors, desktops, gaming desktops, all-in-ones, and projectors.
Each scrape captured every product visible on the category page, including its position, title, brand, price, and whether it carried a sponsored label. Sponsored detection methods vary by retailer: Criteo markers on Currys, native ad classes on Amazon, data-testid attributes on John Lewis, and platform-specific patterns on Takealot and Argos.
A "product appearance" is one product in one position on one category page scrape. The same product appearing in the same position across multiple hourly scrapes counts as multiple appearances. This reflects the actual shopper experience — every time a category page is loaded, that product is either visible or it is not.
We publish detailed sponsored vs. organic breakdowns for every brand across every retailer — free in our Q1 2026 Digital Shelf Report.
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