Swiggy Zomato Ad Revenue Model: They Sell Ads, Not Biryani

Swiggy and Zomato are advertising businesses that use food to build the audience. That is our analysis, but their own annual reports carry the receipts. Zomato’s FY24 report says ad income grew faster than the value of food ordered on the platform. Swiggy’s FY25 report says more than 65% of its transacting restaurant partners now use its self-serve ad tool. The biryani gets you to open the app. The ad slot is what gets sold.

One note up front. This is independent analysis and opinion. Sponsored listings are legal and labelled. Every figure below comes from company filings or named, dated reporting, all cited in the sources box.

What is the Swiggy Zomato ad revenue model?

Open either app and search “biryani”. The first results are not simply the best biryani near you. Some of those slots are paid placement, marked as ads. A restaurant bought that position in an auction.

Both companies describe the machine in their own filings. Swiggy’s FY 2024-25 annual report lists how the food delivery business earns: commissions charged to restaurant partners, advertising revenue from restaurant partners, and fees. Instamart runs the same structure with advertising revenue from brand partners. The accounting notes go further. Swiggy recognises advertisement revenue based on clicks, because it “controls the advertisement space”. That is the most honest sentence in the document. Swiggy books ad revenue when you click.

Zomato runs the same stack. Commissions from restaurants, ad income from restaurants and brands, and a platform fee charged to you, introduced in Q2 FY24 (Zomato Annual Report FY24).

So the model is a three-layer toll. The restaurant pays a commission to be on the road. It pays again for ads to be visible on the road. And you pay a platform fee to use the road. Food is the thing that moves. It is no longer the thing that pays best.

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How fast is the ad money actually growing?

Faster than the food. That is the entire story, and it comes straight from the filings.

Zomato’s FY24 annual report: food delivery revenue grew 40% year on year to Rs 6,361 crore while gross order value grew 23%. The report names the drivers. Take-rate expansion. The new platform fee. And ad income that “grew faster than GOV”, powered by two things: more ad inventory on the platform, and higher average ad spends per advertiser. Read that line again. More ad slots, and each advertiser paying more per slot. That is not restaurant language. That is what an ad network says on an earnings call.

FY25, same engine, bigger numbers. Zomato’s food delivery revenue rose 27% to Rs 8,080 crore, driven by “commission income, ad income and platform fees” (Storyboard18, July 2025, reading Eternal’s FY25 annual report).

Swiggy tells the same story. In FY25 its food delivery gross order value grew 16.4%, but gross revenue grew 19.5% to Rs 7,265 crore, from Rs 6,082 crore in FY24. The annual report credits “user growth, larger basket sizes and rising advertising revenues”. Then it drops the flywheel line: advertising revenues are “scaling fast, powered by a self-serve tool now used by over 65% of transacting restaurant partners”. Swiggy averaged about 238,000 monthly transacting restaurant partners in FY25. So roughly two out of every three restaurants on the platform are using the ad machine.

Quick commerce is even further along. Blinkit’s take rate rose from 16.5% in FY23 to 18.5% in FY24, and Zomato’s report credits “better ad monetization” as one of the three levers (Zomato Annual Report FY24). Zepto crossed Rs 1,000 crore in annualised advertising revenue in November 2024 (YourStory). Five months later, cofounder Aadit Palicha told Y Combinator’s Garry Tan that Zepto’s ad revenue had gone from a $40 million ARR to over $200 million ARR in a year (Inc42, April 2025). Five times in twelve months. We showed in our quick commerce unit economics teardown that the delivery math barely closes. The ad line is how the spreadsheet gets rescued.

Even dining out runs on this now. Swiggy’s Dineout vertical reached profitability on what its own annual report calls an “advertising-led monetisation strategy”.

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What does a restaurant actually pay to show up?

Here is the take-rate stack, from the restaurant’s side of the counter.

Commission comes first. Swiggy charges 18 to 25% per order and Zomato roughly 15 to 30%, depending on city and negotiation, according to restaurant POS provider Petpooja (July 2026). Then comes visibility. Paid promotions on Swiggy run about Rs 2,000 to Rs 8,000 a month depending on the city, per the same source. Then GST on the commission, and packaging.

Petpooja’s worked example: on a Rs 500 order at a 22% commission, the kitchen nets about Rs 352. Nearly 30% of the order value is gone before the restaurant spends a single rupee on ads. The ad spend sits on top of that.

And ad budgets have a habit of growing. The Captable reported in March 2025 on one Uttar Pradesh restaurateur who authorised Rs 5,000 in monthly ad spend and was charged Rs 8,200 in the first month. A year later he authorised Rs 6,700 and was billed Rs 27,500, which he says was applied across his three restaurants without his agreement. That is his account, as reported. But the structural point stands regardless of any one bill. Once discovery is auctioned, skipping ads means going invisible on a platform that, for that same restaurateur, drove 80% of his online sales.

That is not a partnership. That is rent, plus a billboard fee, on a street the landlord built with your food.

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What happens to search results when the feed is for sale?

The ranking stops being a menu and starts being a billboard.

An ad-funded feed answers a different question than you asked. You asked “what is the best biryani near me”. The auction answers “who paid the most to be your biryani tonight”. The two answers overlap sometimes. The incentive does not care whether they do.

Regulators have been circling the wider game. Reuters reported in November 2024 that the CCI’s investigation arm found Zomato’s and Swiggy’s exclusivity arrangements with restaurant partners breached competition law, with the findings shared with the companies but not made public (Medianama, November 2024). Both companies said they were awaiting the CCI’s final decision (YourStory, November 2024). To be clear: that probe concerns exclusivity and pricing practices, no final order has been published, and sponsored listings themselves are perfectly legal.

Which is exactly the point. Nobody needs to break a rule for this to work. When a platform earns more from the auction than from the order, the feed serves the auction. That is not a scandal. That is just what the incentive builds, disclosed in the annual report, one labelled ad slot at a time.

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Why should marketers care?

Because this is the aggregator life cycle, and it repeats in every category.

Stage one: subsidise demand and aggregate users. Stage two: charge the supply side a commission. Stage three: sell ads against the traffic you now control. Food delivery has hit stage three. Quick commerce sprinted there faster, which is why Zepto’s valuation story leans so hard on its ad line, and why the Zepto, Blinkit and Instamart war is really a fight over whose shelf brands must pay to appear on. It is also why the super app fantasy refuses to die: more surfaces mean more ad inventory.

If your brand depends on a platform for discovery, your rank is a rented billboard and the rent only goes up. Zomato’s filing said it plainly: ad income grew because inventory grew and each advertiser paid more. You are the advertiser in that sentence. So budget platform visibility as paid media, measure it like paid media, and build at least one channel the auction cannot touch. We keep making this argument at The Brand Crush because the pattern keeps winning.

Swiggy and Zomato did not trick anyone. They just noticed that the most valuable shelf in India is a phone screen at 8pm, and they own it. The biryani was never the product. Your attention was.

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FAQ

Three main ways on food delivery: commissions charged to restaurants, advertising revenue from restaurants and brands (sponsored listings and banners), and fees, including the platform fee users pay per order. Both companies describe this structure in their own filings (Swiggy Annual Report FY 2024-25; Zomato Annual Report FY24). Zomato’s FY24 report states that ad income grew faster than gross order value.

Swiggy charges about 18 to 25% per order and Zomato about 15 to 30%, varying by city and contract, according to restaurant POS provider Petpooja (July 2026). On a Rs 500 order at 22% commission, a restaurant nets roughly Rs 352 after commission, GST and packaging, before any ad spend.

Large and growing fast. Zepto crossed Rs 1,000 crore in annualised advertising revenue in November 2024 (YourStory) and cofounder Aadit Palicha said its ad ARR grew from $40 million to over $200 million in a year (Inc42, April 2025). Blinkit’s take rate rose from 16.5% to 18.5% in FY24, helped by better ad monetisation (Zomato Annual Report FY24).

Yes. Sponsored listings are a standard, disclosed advertising product and are labelled in the app. The argument in this piece is about incentives, and it is opinion: when advertising becomes a fast-growing revenue line, platforms have a structural reason to give paid visibility more weight in what users see first.

Reuters reported in November 2024 that the CCI’s investigation arm found both companies’ exclusivity arrangements with restaurant partners breached competition law (Medianama, November 2024). The findings were shared with the companies, and both said they were awaiting the CCI’s final decision (YourStory, November 2024). No final order has been made public. The probe began in 2022 after a complaint by the National Restaurant Association of India.

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