Today, Lyft is formally introducing its “Rider Graph:” the audience intelligence layer at the core of Lyft Ads, and the true engine behind how brands can reach Lyft riders across our app and beyond.
For years, the advertising industry has been working around a fundamental gap. Digital signals — clicks, scrolls, viewable impressions — are abundant, but they're disconnected from what a person actually does once they put their phone down. Real-world intent, the kind that ends in a decision, or a visit, or a purchase, has been mostly invisible to brands. The Rider Graph is our answer to that gap.
It's the result of years of investment in our first-party data and modeling, translating hundreds of millions of rides into audience segments that reflect riders’ interests, preferences, and habits brands can connect with.
Why We Built It
Every day, Lyft hosts millions of rides, and gains important knowledge about where people are going, what they’re interested in, and how they’re getting there. A drop-off at a stadium is a fan. A repeat morning ride to the same office is a commuter. A Saturday night route from a restaurant to a music venue tells a story no amount of online browsing could.
The Rider Graph is how we make these signals usable at the scale and with the precision a modern advertiser needs.
Powering the Rider Graph
At its simplest, the Rider Graph is a living behavioral map that combines four key signals into a broader picture.
Deterministic identity: Every Lyft rider is a logged-in, authenticated user.
Observed destinations and events: Drop-off intents at real-world venues and the cultural moments they host — stadiums, hotels, restaurants, retailers, airports.
Behavioral patterns over time: A single ride intent is a moment, but put hundreds of ride intents together, and they become a routine, and routines reveal where brands can meaningfully serve in riders’ lives.
Commercial context: Most ride intents involve some place a brand cares about, a movement that could result in a real-world action.
The Rider Graph captures who's traveling, where they're going, and what they’re probably doing when they get there.
Seed-to-Fan Expansion
The most distinctive thing the Rider Graph does is turn a small group of rides into a much larger, behaviorally aligned audience – something we call seed-to-fan expansion.
It starts with “seed users” or riders whose inputs indicate they’re interested in attending a real-world event, like a concert, a playoff game, or a brand’s pop up. From there, the Rider Graph identifies other Lyft riders who have a shared interest with the seed group, even if they didn’t share an interest in attending the original event. The result is an audience segment that stays anchored to deterministic intent while expanding from thousands of riders to hundreds of thousands of fans.
Across our pre-built rider segments, we're able to expand seed groups by 9x to 89x while maintaining a high level of audience relevance.
For brands, this means reaching the right folks at the right moments, and less wasted ad spend. Instead of guessing who might be a fan, a foodie, or a jetsetter based on what they click, advertisers can reach the people whose intents prove they already are, and with an unprecedented confidence at scale that makes a campaign worth running.
Enhancing the Lyft Ads Ecosystem
While the Rider Graph is the engine, our diverse suite of digital and in-person ad products is the vehicle brands can hop in to take it for a spin.
First Ride Takeover: lets a brand own a rider's entire first journey of the day, from match to drop-off.
Map Splash: turns the moment of opening the Lyft app into a splashy brand moment.
Sponsored Rides: puts tangible value in the rider's hand at the moment of choice, in the form of ride credits.
Map Vehicles: transforms the familiar car icons into a brand’s creative canvas.
Car Wraps: carry brand storytelling onto the streets of the cities in an unmissable experiential event.
Audience Extension: allows brands to extend Lyft’s first-party audiences beyond our app, so a campaign that starts on a Friday-night Lyft ride can continue across CTV, gaming, and other publishers through the weekend.
With the Rider Graph powering them, these innovative ads solutions reach riders on- and offline with bespoke advertising experiences that only Lyft Ads can provide.
What’s Next
Brands now have an inside look at the Rider Graph, and how Lyft Ads combines the precision of first-party identity, the verifiability of physical-world intent, and the reach of premium digital and IRL placements, all on one platform.
This is how audience intelligence should be derived: not from clicks, but observed in motion.