Instacart 2025 Review: Growth Accelerates as Digital Grocery Expands

TL;DR: Instacart closed 2025 with accelerating GTV and is projected to grow ~11.8% in 2026, nearly 4x faster than the total grocery market as consumers continue shifting spend online. Its advertising business is expanding largely in line with GTV, with brands prioritizing onsite paid search over incremental media intensity. For consumer brands, Instacart remains a must-win omnichannel grocery account, even as competition from Amazon, Walmart, and DoorDash intensifies within a rapidly expanding digital grocery market.

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We wholeheartedly agree with Instacart’s management team that grocery is “massive, still early in its online journey, highly fragmented and one of the most operationally complex categories in all of retail.”

Our forecasts reinforce that point. We expect online grocery channels to grow ~11.2% per annum over the next five years, compared to ~0.8% for physical grocery store channels. Put simply, the category’s growth is increasingly being created in digital channels.

That makes Instacart a critical omnichannel platform for consumer brands. This view is supported by Instacart’s near-term momentum in 4Q25 and our 2026 outlook, where we project Instacart GTV growth of 11.8% versus ~3% growth for the total grocery market.

While much recent attention has been paid to Amazon’s momentum in grocery and Instacart’s competitors DoorDash and Uber Eats expanding into the category, the sheer tailwind of consumers spending more of their grocery budgets online is presenting enough room for multiple companies to win, at the expense of physical store channels.

Below, we break down Instacart’s 4Q25 performance and 2026 outlook, with additional commentary on its advertising trajectory and agentic commerce integrations.