By Karsten Weide, Chief Analyst
Executive Summary
Criteo reported their fourth quarter 2025 earnings on Wednesday, February 11, 2026. There was good news and bad news. First the good news: Criteo is repositioning itself around what it calls Agentic Commerce, embedding AI agents, recommendation services and Model Context Protocol (MCP) infrastructure across its platform.
The bad news: The company faced a setback as $25 million in spending from two retail media clients – Uber Eats and Roundel, Target’s retail media business – disappeared. Underlying growth helped cushion the impact, but retail media revenue still declined by nearly $14 million, or 15% year over year. Criteo had disclosed these client decisions a year ago. Even so, now that the impact has fully materialized, it remains a bitter pill to swallow, especially given that retail media is Criteo’s primary growth engine.
Total gross revenue for the quarter came in at $541 million, down 2% year over year. Net revenue or contribution ex-TAC (traffic acquisition costs) was $330 million, down 1% year over year. Net income fell 36% to $46 million from $72 million a year earlier. Adjusted EBITDA declined 17% from $144 million to $120 million.
Strategically, however, Criteo used this earnings call to signal new beginnings. The company launched its Agentic Commerce Recommendation Service, expanded its Audience and Insights Agents, and leaned heavily into AI-powered orchestration across retail media and performance media. In other words, Criteo is leveraging agentic AI technology for better, faster, and cheaper advertising – and for better competitiveness.
For advertisers, this means improved workflow efficiency and campaign effectiveness. For retailers and publishers, it reinforces Criteo’s ambition to remain at the center of commerce media monetization. For competitors, especially independent DSPs and retail media networks, it raises the competitive bar around AI decisioning and interoperability.
Investors were less enthusiastic. The stock declined in premarket trading following an earnings-per-share miss (EPS), reflecting concern over margin compression and 2026’s muted growth outlook.
Revenue Numbers
Full year 2025 gross revenue was $1.945 billion, up 1% year over year from $1.933 billion. Net revenue for the year reached $1.175 billion, up 5% year over year from $1.121 billion year over year. For comparison, Criteo’s net revenue grew by 10% annually in 2023 and 2024. With this kind of growth, Criteo is hard pressed to keep up with competitors such as The Trade Desk (not to mention AppLovin).
Criteo’s number of clients continued to decline, yet revenue per client increased. In other words, the company effectively purges weaker clients and better leverages the stronger ones.
Revenue By Product Segment: Retail Media Don’t Grow Fast Enough
Criteo operates two primary product segments: Performance Media (mainly the retargeting business) and Retail Media.
In Q4 2025, Performance Media generated $465 million in gross revenue, up 1% year over year, and $255 million in Contribution ex-TAC, up 2%. Retail Media generated $76 million in gross revenue and $75 million in Contribution ex-TAC, equivalent to a 17% decline.
Zooming out, Criteo has meaningfully grown Retail Media over the past few years, from virtually nothing in 2018 to 23% of Contribution ex-TAC today, with Performance Media accounting for the remaining 77%. That is a significant strategic shift. But Q4 exposed the sensitivity of the strategically critical Retail Media business to large-client dynamics.
The key takeaway is that Retail Media, despite its importance to Criteo’s growth narrative, remains vulnerable to concentration risk and is not growing fast enough to offset volatility. Amazon’s rapidly expanding retail media operation may generally impede Retail Media sales.
Criteo is attempting to mitigate this volatility by embedding AI across both segments. In Performance Media, Go, its AI-powered automation and optimization platform, appears to be scaling effectively. In Retail Media, the company is expanding auction-based display, shoppable video, and AI-driven optimization layers to strengthen performance and stabilize growth.
Revenue By Geography
Criteo reports revenue across three regions: the Americas, which accounted for 45% of gross revenue in Q4; EMEA at 37%; and Asia Pacific at 18%. Sales accelerated in EMEA, its home base, with 11% growth, while trends were weaker in the Americas, down 12%, largely due to the previously mentioned U.S.-based retail media clients. Asia Pacific posted modest 1% growth.
Despite these short-term fluctuations, the regional mix has remained relatively stable over time, with gradual gains in the Americas driven by the U.S. market and a slow relative decline in APAC. Overall, Criteo’s geographic diversification remains a structural strength, helping insulate the business from localized disruptions and client-specific volatility.
Stock Price
Despite beating revenue expectations, Criteo missed consensus estimates on EPS and issued cautious guidance for 2026. Both factors weighed on investor sentiment. The stock fell 14% in pre-market trading following the 8:00 AM Eastern earnings release, before recovering later in the session to close down roughly 6% versus its pre-earnings level. Even so, shares are now trading near new 52-week lows.
Markets are forward looking. At the moment, investors see modest top-line growth, retail media headwinds, and potential margin pressure stemming from continued AI investments.
Cash Reserve
Criteo ended 2025 with $389 million in cash and marketable securities and total financial liquidity of approximately $891 million, with no long-term debt. The balance sheet is more than sufficient to fund ongoing AI investments, support organic expansion, pursue selective acquisitions, and continue share repurchases. In 2025 alone, Criteo deployed $152 million toward buybacks, and the board has authorized up to $200 million in additional repurchases for 2026.
Looking Ahead
The major announcement of the quarter was the push into agentic commerce. Criteo introduced its Agentic Commerce Recommendation Service, expanded conversational shopping experiences and embedded agents for audience creation, insights and campaign workflows.
- Strengths. Criteo’s greatest strength remains its commerce data foundation. The company leverages visibility into over $1 trillion in ecommerce transactions annually, combined with scaled retailer relationships. Its diversified client base, 90% retention rate and strong cash generation provide durability.
- Weaknesses. Retail media concentration risk is real. The $25 million quarterly headwind from two clients demonstrates vulnerability to large account shifts. Guidance for growth in 2026 was “flat to 2%” Contribution ex-TAC, posing a risk to fall behind other players in the retail media space.
- Opportunities. Agentic Commerce and AI-driven recommendation services open new monetization paths, especially as large language model platforms integrate commerce functionality. Self-service expansion through Go and cross-channel orchestration also widen Criteo’s addressable market.
- Threats. Competition in retail media networks, DSPs embedding AI agents, in-housing by major brands and regulatory pressure around data usage all remain structural risks.
The broader digital advertising industry is evolving toward automation, full-funnel measurement and AI-mediated shopping. Criteo’s strategy is aligned with these macro trends. The question is whether execution velocity is high enough to remain competitive.
Conclusion
Criteo’s Q4 2025 earnings reflect a company in transition. Financially solid, strategically ambitious, temporarily constrained. Revenue softness and margin compression are visible, but so is a clear pivot toward AI-native commerce orchestration.
If Agentic Commerce becomes the next major layer in digital shopping, Criteo has positioned itself early. Whether that translates into accelerated growth in late 2026 and beyond will define the next chapter.
About Criteo
Criteo S.A. is a global commerce media company that connects retailers, brands and agencies with shoppers through AI-powered advertising and commerce solutions. The company operates across retail media and performance media, leveraging large-scale commerce data to drive measurable outcomes.
Website: https://www.criteo.com
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