Criteo shares dropped by 20% Wednesday morning after the corporate reported shaky Q1 earnings and revised its steerage downward for the remainder of the yr.
The quantity spent by advertisers on Criteo was up, and exceeded $1 billion for the primary time in Q1 (usually the bottom ebb of the yr for promoting total). However the firm’s Q1 income was $424.6 million, down by 6% from the identical interval final yr. Criteo’s Q1 revenue dropped extra precipitously from $40 million in 2025 to only $8.6 million per right this moment’s report.
For one factor, the corporate is coping with plenty of painful macro-economic headwinds and a tough year-over-year comparability.
Two of Criteo’s largest efficiency promoting clients – who’re ostensibly unnamed however are recognized to be Uber Eats and Goal Roundel, due to an ungainly slip-up earlier this yr – unexpectedly withdrew a minimum of $75 million in spend commitments. Having already integrated that hypothetical income into its steerage, and having misplaced the early spigot of spend itself, Criteo should climate an extended interval of disappointing year-over-year earnings and missed estimates.
By subsequent yr, theoretically, Criteo ought to take pleasure in a extra favorable lookback comparability.
However, for this quarter, the comparability is hard. A yr in the past, Criteo’s fastest-growing non-US vertical was the journey section, which had been particularly sturdy in Europe and EMEA, CFO Sarah Glickman instructed buyers.
“In Q1 of 2026, we did anticipate progress. Within the Center East we really earned some actually, actually good new shoppers there,” Glickman stated. “They usually simply have been sluggish to begin for apparent causes,” she added (within the wildly understated manner that senior execs focus on the results of, say, wars, or the sudden kidnapping-like disappearances of enormous segments of the US Spanish-speaking shopper section, once they’re speaking to buyers).
And Criteo is coping with a consolidation of advert spend to massive platform AI options, whereas it’s had comparatively sluggish adoption of its new AI-powered retail advert product, referred to as Criteo GO.
“Advertisers focus spend on established options in a extra cautious surroundings,” as Glickman put it earlier within the name, in reference to the plateaued adoption.
Retail media can also be not a lot the recent pattern in the meanwhile. Or a minimum of not sufficient to energy investor optimism.
There’s a pipeline for brand new retailers to face up their very own media networks, stated CEO Michael Komasinski, however after a few years and now some 235 retailer shoppers, the expansion has tilted from including net-new retailers to the system to “getting extra out of [the networks] and making these networks work tougher.” That might imply including conquesting options, page-level analytics instruments or new codecs.
However the largest new wave to surf these days is agentic AI. And Criteo is pinning its hopes to an AI revolution.
Criteo is the primary and solely advert tech associate within the ChatGPT Advertisements beta program, for instance. And thus far, greater than 1,000 advertisers have been onboarded. Criteo can also be testing new AI-native codecs, like conversational parts inside an advert unit that permit for a back-and-forth with out the person linking to a brand new web page, or codecs inside an AI chatbot dialogue.
The issue is that these examples are hypothetical. Even the ChatGPT Advertisements partnership remains to be nonexistent-to-marginal when it comes to income. It looks like getting in on the floor ground of the following huge factor. However there’s no assure of that, or whether or not a third-party vendor like Criteo has a monetizable stake within the new system.
Of all of the thrilling new agentic AI descriptions execs enumerated in the course of the question-and-answer interval with buyers, one line by Glickman from the upfront authorized disclosure a part of the decision most likely caught most.
“Our steerage doesn’t assume any materials income contribution from agentic AI initiatives,” she stated.
