Criteo shares dropped by 20% Wednesday morning after the company reported shaky Q1 earnings and revised its guidance downward for the rest of the year.
The amount spent by advertisers on Criteo was up, and exceeded $1 billion for the first time in Q1 (generally the lowest ebb of the year for advertising overall). But the company’s Q1 revenue was $424.6 million, down by 6% from the same period last year. Criteo’s Q1 profit dropped more precipitously from $40 million in 2025 to just $8.6 million per today’s report.
For one thing, the company is dealing with a number of painful macro-economic headwinds and a rough year-over-year comparison.
Two of Criteo’s biggest performance advertising customers – who are ostensibly unnamed but are known to be Uber Eats and Target Roundel, thanks to an awkward slip-up earlier this year – unexpectedly withdrew at least $75 million in spend commitments. Having already incorporated that hypothetical revenue into its guidance, and having lost the early spigot of spend itself, Criteo must weather a long period of disappointing year-over-year earnings and missed estimates.
By next year, theoretically, Criteo should enjoy a more favorable lookback comparison.
But, for this quarter, the comparison is tough. A year ago, Criteo’s fastest-growing non-US vertical was the travel segment, which had been especially strong in Europe and EMEA, CFO Sarah Glickman told investors.
“In Q1 of 2026, we did anticipate growth. In the Middle East we actually earned some really, really good new clients there,” Glickman said. “And they just have been slow to start for obvious reasons,” she added (in the wildly understated way that senior execs discuss the effects of, say, wars, or the sudden disappearances of large segments of the US Spanish-speaking consumer segment, when they’re talking to investors).
And Criteo is dealing with a consolidation of ad spend to large platform AI solutions, while it’s had relatively slow adoption of its new AI-powered retail ad product, called Criteo GO.
“Advertisers concentrate spend on established solutions in a more cautious environment,” as Glickman put it earlier in the call, in reference to the plateaued adoption.
Retail media is also not so much the hot trend at the moment. Or at least not enough to power investor optimism.
There is a pipeline for new retailers to stand up their own media networks, said CEO Michael Komasinski, but after many years and now some 235 retailer clients, the growth has tilted from adding net-new retailers to the system to “getting more out of [the networks] and making those networks work harder.” That could mean adding conquesting solutions, page-level analytics tools or new formats.
But the biggest new wave to surf nowadays is agentic AI. And Criteo is pinning its hopes to an AI revolution.
Criteo is the first and only ad tech partner in the ChatGPT Ads beta program, for example. And so far, more than 1,000 advertisers have been onboarded. Criteo is also testing new AI-native formats, like conversational elements within an ad unit that allow for a back-and-forth without the user linking to a new page, or formats within an AI chatbot dialogue.
The problem is that these examples are hypothetical. Even the ChatGPT Ads partnership is still nonexistent-to-marginal in terms of revenue. It feels like getting in at the ground floor of the next big thing. But there’s no guarantee of that, or whether a third-party vendor like Criteo has a monetizable stake in the new system.
Of all the exciting new agentic AI descriptions execs enumerated during the question-and-answer period with investors, one line by Glickman from the upfront legal disclosure part of the call probably stuck most.
“Our guidance does not assume any material revenue contribution from agentic AI initiatives,” she said.
