Uber Advertising today announced the launch of Ads APIs, making campaign management and performance data programmable across the platform for the first time, with direct access now available to point-of-sale providers, aggregators, and consumer packaged goods brands.

Announced on June 2, 2026, the Ads APIs mark a structural shift in how Uber positions its advertising business. Until now, merchants and brands wanting to run ads on Uber Eats had to navigate the platform's own interface or work through manual processes. The new API layer changes that model, allowing external systems - including the restaurant management and POS platforms that merchants already use daily - to handle campaign creation, activation, and reporting without requiring a separate advertising workflow.

According to Uber, the launch covers two distinct use cases. The first targets integration partners such as POS systems and aggregators, giving them tools to manage advertising on behalf of their merchant customers at scale. The second addresses CPG brands directly, providing API access to sales and category data that was previously accessible only through manual reporting or platform-specific dashboards.

What the APIs actually do

The campaign management side of the Ads APIs enables programmatic creation and management of Sponsored Listingsand Sponsored Search campaigns. Partners can launch and update these ad types across one or many store locations without manual, store-by-store setup. The documentation covers full campaign lifecycle functions: onboarding, activation, and ongoing management. A POS provider managing hundreds of restaurant clients could, in principle, build advertising directly into the operational interface merchants already use, allowing a restaurant to activate a Sponsored Listings campaign without leaving their day-to-day system.

According to Uber, a merchant already using Uber Eats that has never run advertising could turn on Sponsored Listings, increase visibility to high-intent customers, and drive more orders without navigating separate tools. That framing positions the APIs as a tool to lower the barrier to entry for first-time advertisers, not just a technical upgrade for existing large customers. The onboarding path is designed to eliminate the friction that has historically kept smaller operators from engaging with the ads platform.

The Reporting APIs serve a different need. For CPG brands, performance data on Uber Eats has historically arrived fragmented - spread across multiple systems, delayed by manual exports, and difficult to connect to internal business intelligence tools. The new reporting capabilities provide direct access to Uber platform sales and category data, structured around three distinct outputs: advertising performance reporting, sales and category share reporting, and integration with internal reporting systems.

Sales and category share reporting is particularly specific in its design. According to Uber, brands can understand total sales generated on the Uber platform including performance by product and share within brand and category. That level of granularity is meaningful for CPG companies trying to understand how their products are performing relative to competitors within the same category on the platform - a type of market share intelligence that previously required third-party measurement or custom data arrangements.

The third reporting tier - integration with internal reporting systems - addresses the workflow gap directly. Brands can pull Uber platform sales and category data into business intelligence tools for centralized analysis, removing the need to export manually or maintain separate data pipelines for Uber-specific metrics.

"With Ads APIs, we're making advertising more accessible and integrated into how businesses already operate. By opening up these capabilities, we're lowering the barrier to getting started and enabling partners and brands to build solutions that reflect how they run and grow their business on Uber," said Ziwei Liu, Group Product Manager, Uber Advertising.

Three access paths for different audiences

According to Uber's documentation, access to the Ads APIs is structured around three different entry points depending on the type of organization seeking integration. Developers building merchant tools are directed to the Uber Developers Page to review API endpoints and integration details. Integration partners and agencies managing campaigns on behalf of clients connect through their existing Uber sales or operations contact to begin an intake process. Brands seeking to connect Uber data to internal reporting systems follow a supported onboarding path managed by Uber's team.

That structured onboarding requirement - rather than open self-serve access - suggests Uber is managing integration quality and maintaining visibility into how the API layer is being used. It also means the Ads APIs are not a free developer resource anyone can activate immediately. Prospective partners go through a review and intake phase before going live. The intake approach is consistent with how other retail media platforms have introduced API-level access - keeping quality controls in place while the ecosystem of integrations matures.

Reporting capabilities are described as continuing to expand as the APIs evolve. That language signals the current release is not the complete feature set - additional reporting surfaces are expected to follow, though Uber has not specified timelines for those additions.

The practical distinction between the two API sets matters. The campaign management APIs are oriented around write operations - creating, updating, and managing live campaigns. The Reporting APIs are read-oriented, designed to pull data out of Uber's platform and route it into external systems. Together they cover the core operational cycle: launch campaigns, retrieve results, adjust based on data. For partners and CPG brands that want to build Uber advertising into automated bidding or budget pacing workflows, having both APIs available in a single integration package reduces the number of systems that need to be connected.

The Uber Advertising infrastructure arc

The Ads APIs land at a moment when Uber's advertising business has been expanding its technical surface area across multiple fronts. Understanding where this launch sits within that trajectory helps explain the strategic logic.

Uber opened Journey Ads to programmatic buying in June 2024 through partnerships with Google's Display and Video 360, The Trade Desk, and Yahoo DSP. That move gave demand-side platform users access to Uber's in-app ride advertising inventory through Programmatic Guaranteed deals - a shift from direct-only sales that brought Uber inventory into existing media-buying workflows. The European expansion of that programmatic capability followed in June 2025, covering 10 markets including the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Germany, Netherlands, Ireland, Sweden, Poland, Switzerland, and Portugal.

On the measurement side, Uber Advertising launched a custom attention metric in partnership with Adelaide and Kantar on October 31, 2025, creating what the companies described as the first platform-specific, performance-based model for Adelaide's AU metric. Testing showed JourneyTV in-ride video scoring 11% higher than average tablet video benchmarks, while mobile Journey Video Ads achieved 41% higher scores than mobile video benchmarks.

In December 2025, Uber Advertising announced Uber Intelligence, a data collaboration platform built on LiveRamp's clean room infrastructure. That product allows brands to analyze consumer behavior patterns derived from Uber's mobility and delivery services by combining their own customer data with Uber's consented signals through a privacy-compliant architecture.

The January 2026 launch of Journey Takeover with Coca-Cola extended the premium format offering, pairing branded maps with destination-linked ads across 12 markets. Uber's stated advertising revenue target of $1 billion annually has served as a consistent reference point across these successive announcements.

The Ads APIs represent a different layer of this infrastructure build. Where the programmatic and attention measurement developments primarily served brand advertisers and media buyers, the new API layer targets the operational systems that merchants use - POS platforms, aggregators, integration partners - and the internal data infrastructure that CPG companies use to analyze retail performance. It is a move down the stack, closer to where commerce decisions actually happen.

Retail media's API moment

The broader retail media sector has been moving toward API-driven data access as a structural pattern. Walmart Data Ventures launched its Scintilla Media Data Feed API on April 28, 2026, providing agencies and technology partners with access to 500 retail data elements for media planning. Criteo expanded its Retail Media API program with partners including Pacvue, Perpetua, Flywheel, Kenshoo, and Tinuiti years earlier, and Pacvue's MCP server now connects retail media data from more than a dozen networks to AI tools including ChatGPT and Claude.

Within that context, Uber's Ads APIs are a logical step. According to Uber, retail media - including platforms like Uber Eats - is one of the fastest-growing advertising channels, but managing campaigns at scale has continued to require significant manual effort. The API layer is framed as the solution to that operational gap.

What distinguishes Uber's position from a standard retail media network is the underlying data. Uber's mobility signals - derived from ride patterns, destination behavior, and delivery activity across a platform with more than 150 million monthly active consumers globally - provide a targeting foundation that pure-play e-commerce networks cannot replicate. The CPG brand reporting capabilities draw on that data to surface category share intelligence, not just ad performance metrics.

The Ads APIs make that infrastructure accessible to partners building tools and to brands managing their own data flows. The question for the market is how broadly that developer infrastructure will be adopted - and whether the managed onboarding process will accelerate or limit the pace of integration.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Uber Advertising, the advertising division of Uber Technologies, with Ziwei Liu, Group Product Manager at Uber Advertising, as the named spokesperson for the product launch.

What: The launch of Ads APIs, a programmatic interface layer that enables POS systems, aggregators, and integration partners to manage Sponsored Listings and Sponsored Search campaigns on Uber Eats at scale, while also providing CPG brands with direct access to sales and category share data through dedicated Reporting APIs.

When: Announced on June 2, 2026, with documentation available on the Uber Developers Page and access beginning through a managed intake process via existing Uber sales and operations contacts.

Where: The APIs are available globally, covering the Uber Eats platform. Access is structured through the Uber Developers Page for technical documentation, with onboarding managed through Uber's sales and operations teams for integration partners and brands.

Why: Managing advertising across Uber Eats has historically required manual effort and navigation of separate tools, limiting the speed and scale at which merchants and partners can run campaigns. The Ads APIs remove that friction by embedding advertising capabilities directly into the operational systems that merchants and CPG brands already use, while also addressing the fragmented state of retail performance data by providing direct API access to sales and category intelligence.