EverQuote, Inc. Q1 FY2026 Earnings Call

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us, and welcome to EverQuote Q1 2026 Earnings Call. I will now hand the conference over to Sara Buda with EverQuote Investor Relations.

Thank you. Good afternoon, and welcome to EverQuote's First Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. We will be discussing the results announced in our press release issued today after market close. With me on the call this afternoon are Jayme Mendal, EverQuote's Chief Executive Officer; and Joseph Sanborn, EverQuote's Chief Financial Officer and Chief Administrative Officer. During this call, we may make statements related to our business that may be considered forward-looking statements under federal securities laws, including statements considering our financial guidance for the second quarter of 2026. Forward-looking statements may be identified with words and phrases such as aim, expect, believe, intend, anticipate, plan, will, may, continue, upcoming and similar words and phrases. These statements reflect our views only as of today and should not be considered our views as of any subsequent date. We specifically disclaim any obligation to update or revise these forward-looking statements, except as required by law. Forward-looking statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual results to differ materially from our expectations. For a discussion of those risks and uncertainties, please refer to our SEC filings, including our annual report on Form 10-K and our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission and available on the Investor Relations section of our website. Finally, during the course of today's call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures, which include adjusted EBITDA, variable marketing dollars and variable marketing margin, which we believe are helpful to investors. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures was included in the press release we issued after the close of market today, which is available on the Investor Relations section of our website. And with that, I will now turn the call over to Jayme.

Thank you, Sara, and thank you all for joining us today. We delivered excellent results in Q1, exceeding the high end of our guidance range across revenue, VMD and adjusted EBITDA, punctuated by 30% growth in adjusted EBITDA to a record level of $29.3 million. Our strategy is working as planned as we scale our marketplace and deepen provider relationships. When we went public in 2018, EverQuote committed to growing revenue 20% and expanding profitability, adjusted EBITDA margin by 1 to 2 percentage points per year. For 7 years, we've delivered as promised, resulting in 4x revenue growth and over $100 million of annualized adjusted EBITDA expansion. Through disciplined execution, we have built a strong balance sheet and a highly cash-generative business. At the end of Q1, while repurchasing shares of our stock under our share repurchase plan, our cash balance is over $178 million with no debt. And for 3 quarters in a row, we have generated annualized adjusted EBITDA levels at or above $100 million. We will keep driving profitable marketplace growth through focused execution of our strategy and by leveraging AI to drive productivity and accelerate our pace of innovation on behalf of customers. Applying our proprietary data together with AI to support the growth of insurance providers has always been and continues to be foundational to the value we deliver. It has enabled us to become the trusted platform of choice for the country's largest carriers and thousands of local agents to grow their business. We are now continuing to build on this heritage, harnessing Agentic AI capabilities to drive new levels of productivity, innovation and customer performance. We have proven our ability to drive immense productivity gains with tech and AI-enabled automation over time. In the 3 years from Q1 2023 to Q1 of 2026, we have increased revenue per employee by nearly 3x. We are now significantly ramping the build, deployment and usage of Agentic AI tools across our employee population to further enhance productivity and create additional capacity to invest in long-term growth. As examples, we are building what we call an AI cockpit for our sales and service teams to dramatically reduce time spent on repetitive tasks. And we added an AI layer on our homegrown site management platform to automate and improve experimentation on our site experience. More importantly, our teams remain hungry to accelerate our pace of innovation and service of improved customer outcomes using newfound capabilities of Agentic AI. Already today, AI benefits our customers in a number of ways. Our AI-powered traffic engine and proprietary data enable us to effectively deploy ad spend in a way that optimally aligns carriers' underwriting preferences, profitability targets and growth goals with the right consumers based on their location, history, demographics and other factors. Through smart campaigns, we have productized our AI-powered bidding capabilities, improving carriers' ability to optimize return on ad spend in our marketplace, resulting in budget increases and embedding our technology more directly in our clients' workflows. Moving forward, we are rolling out AI-powered products and features to create value for customers at an accelerating rate. For example, we have begun extending smart campaigns to local agents. We also expect LLM-originated traffic to become a growing source across the market broadly. We believe EverQuote can provide carriers and agents with greater access to this traffic as paid advertising opens up and as we invest in content generation and technical integrations with LLM search platforms. Looking ahead, we maintain a favorable outlook for Q2, reflecting continued strong execution by our team in a growth-oriented carrier environment. We are progressing as planned along our path to build a $1 billion revenue business with an accelerating rate of innovation to support the growth of insurance carriers and agents. Over the years, we have proven our ability to listen to our customers' needs and rapidly adapt to changes in the environment to support their success and our financial performance. Agentic AI unlocks new opportunities in many sectors, including ours. As a team, we are aligned and focused as we continue to seize this opportunity to expand our product offering, broaden our competitive moat and propel our long-term success. I will now turn the call over to Joseph, who will discuss our financial results and outlook.

Thank you, Jayme, and good afternoon, everyone. In Q1, we once again delivered impressive financial performance. Before I walk through the details of our Q1 results and Q2 outlook, let me share some key highlights. We grew total revenue 15% year-on-year and grew adjusted EBITDA 30% year-on-year, while also delivering record adjusted EBITDA and operating cash flow. Let me take you through the first quarter. Total revenue grew 15% year-over-year to $190.9 million. Revenue from our auto insurance vertical increased to $172.4 million in Q1, up 13% year-over-year as we continue to benefit from our broad and differentiated distribution. Revenue from our home insurance vertical grew 33% to $18.5 million in Q1 as we continue to benefit from strong execution against the operational plan we implemented last spring to bolster this vertical. Variable marketing dollars, or VMD, increased to a record $55.9 million in the first quarter, up 19% from the prior year period. Variable marketing margin, or VMM, was 29.3% for the quarter, up both sequentially and year-on-year as the new traffic channels we invested in last quarter are starting to show better profitability. Turning to operating expenses and the bottom line. This quarter, we continue to demonstrate the strong operating leverage of the business. As Jayme said, AI and data have always been cornerstones of our business and have both fueled our operational efficiencies and enhanced our revenue generation. As I said on the last call, we have effectively doubled our revenues over the last 2 years while keeping operating expenses nearly flat. AI is positively impacting our economic model, and we are now at a scale where we expect to continue to drive strong cash flow generation and year-on-year adjusted EBITDA growth even as we invest in the business. In the first quarter, we grew GAAP net income to $18.7 million, up from $8 million in the prior year period. Q1 adjusted EBITDA increased 30% from the prior year period to $29.3 million, representing a 15.4% adjusted EBITDA margin. Cash operating expenses, which excludes advertising spend and certain noncash and other onetime charges were $26.6 million in Q1, up from Q4 as expected. We delivered record operating cash flow of $29.6 million for the first quarter. In Q1, we repurchased approximately 19.9 million of shares under our share repurchase program. We ended the period with no debt and cash and cash equivalents of $178.5 million. To recap, we are starting the year with positive momentum driven by 2 primary factors. First, we continue to execute well and deliver strong performance for both carriers and agents. And second, we benefit from a strong and broadening overall demand as carriers continue to sit well below their targeted combined ratio and are seeking to grow policies in force. Turning to guidance for the second quarter of 2026. We expect revenue to be between $185 million and $195 million, representing 21% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. We expect VMD to be between $55 million and $57 million, representing 23% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. And we expect adjusted EBITDA to be between $28 million and $30 million, representing 32% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. Looking to the remainder of the year, we continue to see a healthy environment as carriers focus on growing policies in force, shift spend to digital channels and rely on EverQuote as a partner of choice. We remain committed to our goal of achieving $1 billion in revenues over the next 2 to 3 years while generating strong cash flow and year-on-year adjusted EBITDA growth. At the same time, we are continuing to build on our AI capabilities by making investments in: one, developing AI-first products that can add incremental value to our customers; two, hiring additional AI talent and upskilling our existing team; and three, driving increasing efficiency by deploying Agentic AI tools across every function in the company. To summarize at a high level: one, our continued strong financial performance reflects that our focused strategy to be a trusted growth partner for P&C insurance providers is working; two, we are executing amidst a strong market backdrop as carriers continue to shift spend to digital channels and choose EverQuote as a partner to drive customer acquisition and help them gain market share; three, our ongoing growth and positive outlook offers clear evidence that AI is a tailwind for our business; four, we are building on our AI heritage to bring new value to customers and reinforce our position as an AI beneficiary long term; and five, we remain committed to our path to $1 billion in revenue while driving strong cash flow generation and year-on-year adjusted EBITDA growth. Jayme and I will now take your questions.

Our first question comes from the line of Cory Carpenter with JPMorgan.

I was hoping you all could expand a bit just on what you're seeing out there from the carriers. I know last time we talked a few months ago, carriers were a little more measured to start the year, but clearly, you outperformed your initial expectations. So what do you think drove that? And are you still expecting a similar cadence through the year as you described 3 months ago? And then maybe more near-term, there's been a lot of focus on broader macro uncertainty, oil prices, et cetera. Has that come up at all in your conversations with carriers? Or are you thinking about potential impacts that could affect their spend through the year?

Thanks, Cory. So the carrier underwriting environment is healthy, and it seems to be healthy across the board now. We're seeing 80s combined ratios in auto. We're not seeing home at similar levels for multiple quarters now. And so, we're hearing from our customers a tone of growth orientation pretty much across the board. So we have the market back into growth mode. We have all the major carriers now live and participating in the auction. I don't know if Joseph has anything to add, but that's kind of the sentiment in the market right now.

Yes. Maybe I'll answer your question more specifically with regards to overperformance in Q1. The upside to the quarter was pretty broad based based on carriers doing more spend than they initially indicated. But I would highlight that one carrier in particular was more than double what they said they would spend in the back half of Q1. And so that obviously helped us result in overperformance on the revenue side. As we look beyond Q1, I would reiterate what Jayme said: we feel good about where we're at. Carriers are in growth mode. They want to grow policies in force. They want to use digital channels, and we feel well positioned to help them do that and partner with them to do that. Regarding the macro question, recent carrier conversations, it has not come up. How might it impact carriers as we progress through the year? It's always hard to speculate. But carriers have low combined ratios. So to the extent that cost of repair were to increase, they have a lot of ability to absorb higher costs and claims costs given that combined ratios are quite low and continue to be quite low. The other thing I would say is, if energy prices remain high, one impact you could see is consumers actually driving less, and less miles driven equals fewer accidents. So it could be a benefit to carriers potentially in their combined ratio as well on claims costs.

The next question comes from the line of Maria Ripps with Canaccord.

Congrats on the strong quarter. I just wanted to follow up on the last question. Clearly, growth has been very encouraging here. To what extent should we view first half strength as incremental versus a possible pull forward of second half activity? And more broadly on LLM traffic, you talked about three strategies to capture LLM traffic, which are content, integrations and paid ads. We've seen competitors launching apps within ChatGPT. What are your thoughts on developing similar app-level integrations with AI platforms? How would that fit with your broader strategy?

Sure. So we've been pleased by how the year has started. Q1 is strong and our guide for Q2 obviously is a continuation of what we're seeing in Q1. As we look to the second half of the year, we have not provided guidance for the second half on this call. What we have given you is a view of our path beyond this next quarter, and we've given you a path to being a $1 billion business in 2 to 3 years, and we still feel very good about that and our path to achieve that. Regarding LLMs and app integrations, I would put that under the umbrella of technical integrations. We've been testing in these platforms for a while and have built several apps. We have not pushed anything to production yet. There are a number of apps in the insurance category in ChatGPT; many are similar — they take a web form experience and apply a lightweight conversational front end before spinning the consumer back to a web-based quoting and binding experience. There's a lot of friction to actually access these apps — you need to install or grant permissions — so our sense is very little actual traffic is flowing through those right now. We're working on something that I think will be more interesting, but the challenge is driving traffic into it, and that's where the other elements of the strategy come into play. One is paid advertising — ChatGPT and other LLM platforms opening up to paid ads. We're among the largest paid advertisers in insurance. As the LLMs open up and become more sophisticated paid advertising platforms, we believe that will give us an opportunity to drive immediate scale. We're also investing in content and a content strategy specifically to gain visibility in the LLMs. We have a very experienced and capable team focused on this, and we expect to start seeing impact from their efforts materializing as the year progresses, slowly but steadily. For us, it will be incremental traffic. Historically, we've been paid — we had no SEO traffic. So as this pool of traffic grows and we tap into it, it will represent incremental traffic for EverQuote.

The next question comes from the line of Naved Khan with B. Riley Securities.

On the last call, you gave a stat that 75% of the carriers were below peak levels. Where does that stand today? How does it look to give us some flavor of where demand could be? And then the second question I had is just around the buyback. It looks like you finished the authorization that was out. Have you finished that or do you plan to deploy additional capital toward more of a share buyback?

Thanks for the question, Naved, and welcome to our call. In terms of carrier demand, the stat we gave — percentage of top 25 carriers — is around 80% that are below peak quarterly spend. I'd fine-tune that a bit and remind folks that in any given quarter you wouldn't expect all carriers to be at peak quarterly spend. As we look into Q2, we're seeing recovery, particularly in one of our top 5 carriers who wasn't on the platform until Q1 and was a top 5 carrier prior to the downturn. So we're pleased with that and the room for upside given concentration dynamics. Regarding the buyback, we purchased just under $20 million of shares in Q1. That represents shares purchased to date under the authorization, offsetting about 7.5% dilution. As we look at buybacks, we'll continue to use our buyback plan. In terms of capital allocation, we think about three uses for capital. First and foremost is a fortress balance sheet — we believe strongly in the importance of having a strong balance sheet, we have no debt, and we'll continue to prioritize that. Second is buybacks — we've done a fair amount and see that as a way to return value to shareholders. Third is M&A. We do not see M&A as required to hit our path to $1 billion in revenues; that path is primarily organic. But M&A could accelerate some things we'd otherwise build internally — additional products for carriers and agents, expanding into non-auto verticals, bringing additional sources of traffic or AI talent. All those could be part of our M&A strategy.

The next question comes from the line of Ralph Schackart with William Blair.

Two questions, if I could, please. First, switching to the consumer side, can you talk about shopping levels or some of the search traffic you're seeing given elevated insurance costs? Are you still seeing high intent there? Second, Joseph, on VMD, I know you don't guide the full year, but thinking about linearity for the balance of the year, is it reasonable to see these VMD levels persist for the remainder of the year? You mentioned new traffic channels providing better profitability — any more color would be helpful.

I'll take the first question. As it relates to shopping activity, we expect it to start to normalize this year as the rate cycle somewhat settles down, and that's what we're seeing. We have continued to see year-on-year growth in our search traffic, but we are seeing some normalization in overall traffic levels. That's accompanied by a much more competitive advertising environment from insurers. Within the marketplace, that normalizing volume is being met by much higher value per referral going out the door, which has been a favorable dynamic for us. As demand continues to grow from advertisers, we continue to drive growth ourselves beyond what's happening in the ambient environment by launching and scaling new traffic channels and programs, which we've done successfully over the last quarter and will continue to do over the course of this year.

With regards to VMM, we don't run the business on a day-to-day basis to drive VMM — we drive VMD. We were pleased in Q1 that VMM was over 29%. I think it reflected the strategy we discussed in November when we invested in new channels. Those investments paid off and are scaling at better profitability than they were in Q4 when they initially scaled. As we look into the balance of the year, think of high 20s — 27%, 28% — tipping to 29% as a reasonable range. It's important to recognize there's what we control and what we don't control: advertising costs are competitive and can ebb and flow quarter-to-quarter. What we control is how efficiently we acquire that advertising using our traffic bidding engine. For context, when we were a $250–$260 million auto business, our VMM was in the high 20s. Here we are at roughly 3x that size and VMM is still in the high 20s. The advertising environment has gotten more competitive, but we're continuing to drive efficiencies. So high 20s is a reasonable place to think about VMM for the rest of the year.

The next question comes from the line of Jed Kelly with Oppenheimer.

Given the guidance and outlook, it seems like competition around marketing is pretty stable. VMM margins are going up. Can you talk about that environment? And how should we think about higher gas prices, higher used car prices and higher repair costs — how are those impacting people's ability to shop for insurance?

I would say we have a very healthy marketplace dynamic from our perspective. Demand on the provider side is very strong across carriers, agents, auto and home. We've been investing in growing existing traffic channels and launching and scaling new channels and programs to keep pace with demand. So we're at a relatively stable place right now. As Joseph mentioned, it's consistent with our historical levels of VMM and there's nothing out of the ordinary about it — it's simply a healthy marketplace dynamic.

On the consumer side, shopping levels have been elevated for some time and are starting to normalize a bit from those elevated levels. Regarding the macro dynamics — if used car prices or repair costs increase, that could impact claims costs for carriers. That said, carriers are quite healthy with combined ratios that are still low, so they have significant cushion to absorb higher claims costs if needed. Conversely, high gas prices can reduce miles driven and potentially reduce accidents, which could benefit carriers. So the environment is dynamic: there are headwinds and tailwinds, and our business benefits from both consumer shopping behavior and the demand from carriers seeking to grow policies in force.

The next question comes from the line of Jason Kreyer with Craig-Hallum.

You've spent the last few years in a hard market, with premiums elevated, and now you're transitioning to a softer market — any learnings as far as how EverQuote competes in a new market and how you've gone through that transition?

I think our strategy generally lends itself well to the transition into a new market. We managed effectively through the hard market. Our stated strategy is to become the one-stop shop for agents and carriers to grow their business. When they're in a period focused on growth, they tend to be more open-minded to embracing and testing new products and features. Over the last couple of years, we've developed new products and features that leverage our data and apply AI and machine learning to help agents and carriers grow. We're starting to see an increasing rate of adoption of these products and features because carriers and agents need our help to grow and to hit aggressive growth targets.

That's a good dovetail to my follow-up. On the adoption curve of these AI-enabled solutions, do you feel you're at a critical mass with those products that you brought to market?

Yes, I do. It's an exciting time. There are a few companies in our market that are better equipped to benefit from Agentic AI capabilities than others, but we've been applying AI and our proprietary data to acquire traffic, streamline insurance shopping and help providers grow for years. Historically that's been machine learning and reinforcement learning, and more recently generative AI and now Agentic AI tools. We're seeing carriers and agents need our help to access the benefits of these tools sooner than they could on their own. This year is marking an acceleration in Agentic AI adoption and usage at EverQuote in two ways: internally and for customers. Internally, engineering has used generative AI for years through copilots, and in the last six months Agentic coding capabilities have reached a point where we can rethink our software development lifecycle to be Agentic-first, unlocking gains in our ability to ship value faster. Beyond engineering, we're integrating AI tools and agents throughout operations — site experimentation, debug carrier integrations, legal design, and more — driving productivity improvements. For customers, adoption has been strong. Smart campaigns for carriers continue to improve, and we're extending smart campaigns to local agents. We have a next-generation proprietary traffic bidding platform introducing advanced reinforcement learning into traffic bidding. We're investing in LLM-based traffic and AI SEO. All this is coming together this year and we're excited for the internal productivity and customer value it will unlock.

We have reached the end of the Q&A session. I will now turn the call back to management for closing remarks.

Thank you. Well, thanks all for joining us. It was an excellent quarter for us, continuing to grow. We produced record adjusted EBITDA, and we're executing. We're executing our strategy, accelerating our marketplace flywheel. We're deepening our customer relationships. And we're really progressing through 2026 from a position of strength. We feel we're really well positioned to further embed AI into both our operations and our products to usher the insurance market into an AI-native future. And we look forward to sharing more along the way. Nice evening.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.