Tech & Innovation
Building The Intent Engine: How Instacart is Revamping Query Understanding with LLMs
Authors: Yuanzheng Zhu, Guanghua Shu, Raochuan Fan, Vinesh Gudla, Tejaswi Tenneti Introduction When people search for items on Instacart, they don’t always type perfectly worded phrases. They might write “bread no gluten” or “x large zip lock” — and that’s okay. Our job is to understand what they mean, not just what they type. This process, called Query Understanding (QU), is the intent engine that...
Nov 21, 2025
Read time: 14 min