EverQuote, Inc. (EVER) Q3 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us and welcome to the EverQuote third quarter 2026 earnings call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star one again. I will now hand the conference over to Sarah Buddha, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome to EverQuotes' third 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 Jamie Mendel, EverQuotes' Chief Executive Officer, and Joseph Sanborn, EverQuotes' 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 fourth 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 refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures, which include adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margin, 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 market closed today, which is available on the investor relations section of our website. And with that, I'll now turn the call over to Jamie.

Thank you, Sarah, and thank you all for joining us today. We delivered exceptional performance in Q3. We generated record results across our key financial metrics, exceeding the high end of our guidance range. Our marketplace continues to fire on all cylinders as carriers maintain strong underwriting profitability and appetite for growth, and our team is executing well to meet this demand. In Q3, we continue to diversify our revenue across carriers, product offerings, and verticals, punctuated by outstanding performance in our home vertical, which grew by 70% year-over-year. Our market position remains strong, and we are growing and deepening customer relationships with both carriers and agents. Furthermore, we believe we are making great progress as we begin to lead the P&C insurance industry into the AI era. First, we continue to use AI to drive productivity. In Q3, our engineering teams reduced cycle time by 36% quarter-over-quarter through adoption of our agentic coding pipeline. We have also achieved broad adoption of AI tools across non-engineering functions, allowing us to innovate and launch new products faster while growing adjusted EBITDA by over 40% year-over-year. Second, AI remains a reliable driver of our consistent marketplace growth. We have deployed smart campaigns to new carriers and to more local agents. This AI bidding solution drives benefits including higher conversion rates, which, in turn, allows us to access more budget so we can maximize highly targeted policy volume at customers' performance targets. We also rolled out new AI-native features to local agents in the quarter, including a new AI-based reporting tool that surfaces insights to help them understand and optimize account activity. Third, and perhaps most importantly, AI underpins our strategy to broaden our value to customers and expand our long-term addressable market. We are at the forefront, leading P&C In Q3, AI agents took center stage when Meta and OpenAI launched their personal agents. We have long anticipated personal agents as the next step in the evolution of insurance digital marketing and distribution, from web-native to LLM-native to Agentic. For months in advance of the launches of Muse and Dots, we were in discussions with carriers about agentic commerce to help educate and prepare them for this next wave of change. In fact, during the quarter, we published a thought leadership white paper on agentic shopping and P&C insurance distribution, which has led to an active dialogue with major carriers as they themselves contemplate how to adapt. This topic has become a major focus area for our customers, and we are partnering with carriers to innovate solutions that help them navigate this fast-developing landscape. Last week, we launched LUVA, a separately-branded AI-native P&C insurance shopping platform for consumers that will be integrated with LLMs and AI commerce agents. We believe EverQuote can emerge as a key player in the AI ecosystem by bridging the needs of consumers using LLMs and AI agents to research and shop insurance, with insurers' need to access these consumers while maintaining control over how their pricing, product, and brand are represented. We are rolling out apps across LLM and agentic platforms like Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic. These integrations are subject to the platform's review and approval process, but will build on each solution over time in close partnership with carriers. It is clear that our carrier and agent customers will need help adapting as agentic AI plays a larger role in P&C insurance distribution over time. We see tremendous opportunity in this dynamism. With our unique data, technology, and industry relationships developed over the last 15 years, we are ideally suited to help steward P&C insurance distribution into the AI era. Recent and forthcoming product launches position us to capitalize on this market evolution. In summary, it has been an exciting quarter at EverQuote, and we are proud of maintaining our track record of sustained profitable growth while making investments in our future. As evidenced by our Q3 performance, the business is healthy and the team is executing well. We continue to make progress across our strategic priorities and we are accelerating new product innovation to lead our industry into the agentic AI era. I will now turn the call over to Joseph, who will discuss our financial results and outlook.

Thank you, Jamie, and good afternoon, everyone. We delivered record results in Q3 and exceeded the top end of our guidance We grew revenue 25% and adjusted EBITDA 41% year-over-year. We also drove record variable marketing dollars, or VMD, and adjusted EBITDA, while at the same time generating strong cash flow. Our AI investments are already yielding results, and we will continue to invest to extend our market leadership position even further. Now, let's turn to the details of the third quarter. Total revenue increased to $218.1 million. Revenue from our auto insurance vertical grew to $190.4 million in the third quarter, an increase of 21% year-over-year. Our home insurance vertical grew 70% in Q3 to $27.7 million as carriers continue to lean into home as a growth opportunity and as we align our solutions and resources to scale this vertical and diversify our business. We were executing well in a healthy environment. Looking at customers, eight of our top 10 carriers grew sequentially, underscoring that demand continues to be broad-based. VMD increased to $62.6 million in the third quarter, up 25% from the prior year period. Variable marketing margin, or VMM, was 28.7% for the quarter. Turning to operating expenses and the bottom line. In the third quarter, gap net income was $18.2 million, down from $18.9 million in the prior year period, Due primarily to income tax increasing $7.3 million year-over-year and a one-time $4 million termination fee related to a vendor contract for advertising services. Q3 adjusted EBITDA increased 41% from the prior year period to $35.5 million, representing a 16.3% adjusted EBITDA margin. Cash operating expenses, which excludes advertising spend in certain non-cash and other chargers, were $27.2 million in Q3, up slightly from Q2. We reported operating cash flow of $40.5 million for the third quarter. We ended the period with no debt and cash and cash equivalents of $229.1 million. We recently announced that our board authorized a new $50 million share repurchase program. As a reminder, under our previous program, which concluded in Q2, we purchased 2.5 million shares, totaling $50 million. The recent authorization is a component of our three-pronged approach to capital allocation, which includes, one, maintaining a fortress balance sheet, two, pursuing targeted M&A and investment opportunities that align with our growth strategy to expand our TAM, and three, returning capital to shareholders through stock repurchases. The continued strength of our operations and expectations for ongoing growth and profitability give us confidence that we have the flexibility and capacity to execute these priorities. Finally, as Jamie mentioned, we are focused on broadening our offerings and leading our sector into the agentic AI era. This includes new solutions that capitalize on emerging models for agentic LLM traffic and extend the value we provide carriers and agents as they adapt to new models. These initiatives build on the success of our marketplace and reinforce our position as an AI beneficiary long-term. We look forward to sharing more with you in the coming quarters. Turning to guidance for the fourth quarter of 2026, we expect revenue to be between $213 and $223 million, representing 12% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. We expect VMD to be between $57 million and $60 million, representing 19% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. As we mentioned, we are investing in new agentic LLM channels and developing new solutions to drive long-term growth. As a result, VMM is expected to decrease sequentially from Q3. Our Q4 jested EBITDA is expected to be between 29 and 32 million, representing 22% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. Looking ahead, we expect healthy carry demand into the coming year. Insurer combined ratios remain low, and we are benefiting from operating in the relatively early stages of a prolonged soft market cycle. As illustrated in our investor presentation available on our IR website, industry analysts have forecast this soft market cycle could continue well into 2029 or beyond as carriers focus on growing policies and force. Amidst this positive environment, EverQuote is a trusted growth partner of choice for both carriers and agents. Our home vertical is showing impressive growth and we continue to broaden our customer relationships. Our investments and expanding AI solutions are delivering measurable customer results, establishing a strong foundation for sustained growth. As a reminder, on a November 2025 earnings call, we shared our goal to become a billion-dollar revenue company within two to three years while also generating strong cash flow. Here we are 12 months later. As evidenced by our results and guidance, we are executing well toward our goal. We are on track to reach the $1 billion revenue mark within the stated timeline, which means that we expect to achieve our goal within the next one to two years. At the same time, we are making the right investments today to lead our sector into the agentic AI era tomorrow and scale well beyond our near-term $1 billion revenue goal while generating strong cash flow. In conclusion, we continue to execute our strategy to be a trusted growth partner for our customers. We reported a record quarter across all key metrics with strong growth and cash flows. We have a focused growth strategy to innovate and expand our offerings, capitalize on new growth opportunities with Agentic AI, and broaden our value for our customers. We believe this is an exciting time to be a shareholder of EverQuote as we continue building upon our strong foundation while also innovating for what's next. Jamie and I will now take your questions.

We will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. We ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality. If you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Ralph Shackert with William Blair. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Thank you.

Good evening. Thanks for taking the questions. Jamie, maybe just to kind of kick it off, maybe at a high level, can you walk us through how you see the workflow? Let's say I go to an agent such as Muse or something similar, and I don't know, maybe a simple query, like I want to lower my auto insurance and maybe get a little bit more details. Like, how does that sort of trigger, I guess, maybe your agent or sort of that flow, or how does EverQuote in this evolving world integrate into that?

Sure. So, you know, I think there's how it works today and then how it's likely to evolve over time. You know, today, Meta or Muse will sort of make a determination as to how best to complete that task. And through our testing, we've seen it try a lot of different things from going directly to carrier sites to looking at comparison sites like ours. But if you zoom out, you know, I mean, we've been anticipating and planning for agentic commerce for some time now. And I think from the consumer's perspective, these personal agents are going to be helpful across a lot of tasks, including researching and shopping insurance. But, you know, as we know, there are certain aspects of the insurance sector that differentiate it from others. You've got the regulatory and compliance considerations, the preference towards rate opacity from a handful of particularly the largest carriers, material costs associated with like accessing rates. And so while from the consumer's perspective, using an AI agent to compare and shop is likely an attractive option. I think that ultimately, the shape that this takes over time will really start to depend on how carriers respond. And, you know, Ralph, we published a thought piece on this, and we've since spoken with just about every major carrier on this topic over the last six weeks. And so I'll share a few things that we've heard, which I think represents probably the latest in terms of how the industry is thinking about it. You know, first, I think most carriers are in kind of learning mode right now. So, they're just observing, you know, what's going on and trying to understand it. Number two is, I think across the board, they do perceive potential risk to their business if agentic commerce is left kind of unmanaged. And the risk that they are concerned about, I think, is continuous re-shopping, which could compress their policy life expectancy. I think they do not support rate transparency, particularly if it's out of context or not controlled by the carrier themselves. That can lead to adverse selection. And then you still have a lot of legal and compliance questions that are unanswered. And so, I think initially, most carriers are likely to move pretty slowly and impose some guardrails around how the rates are accessed, much like they did in the web era, candidly. But, you know, ultimately, I think the carriers will start to want to access this traffic as long as they can access it in ways that align with their requirements. So, you know, you've got the consumer that will probably want to apply this use case. You've got the carriers who are still working through it. And then you've got the third category, which is what you asked about, which is the actual AI agents themselves, or the platforms that operate them. And what do they want? Well, they want a streamlined path to access products, right? They want inexpensive, they want fast, they want ultimately effective. And so we've done a lot of testing. Based on this testing, I think today they're pretty far off from getting the job done well. They can only access a relatively small subset of available products. And it costs quite a bit to actually run one of these shopping cycles today in terms of compute. So, you know, this is going to develop over time. We see it as a really significant opportunity for EverQuote, given our position in the value chain, our scale, our technical acumen, carrier relationships we have. But we do see an evolution towards more agentic discovery over time, same way traditional advertising shifted to digital. And we think EverQuote can play a significant role in this next phase of distribution to help solve for the best outcome, not just for consumers, but also for carriers and for the AI platforms themselves alike.

That's super helpful. Thank you. Just maybe one quick one. And just looking at homeowners' growth of 70%, obviously very strong this quarter. Joseph, I think you talked about just carriers leaning in, but any more color on this in terms of the drivers? And then, you know, how should we think about this growth rate going forward? Thank you.

Yeah, we were pleased with how the vertical did this quarter. I mean, just to give some context, Ralph, you know, we made some decisions in the first part of last year We're going to really start to put some new execution expertise around the home vertical. We've talked about how we saw this opportunity emerging. First, the carriers focused on getting the right pricing in auto. Now, they've switched into home. And we saw that coming. We got ready for it. So our teams have been doing a really nice job. The first part of this year, we had 30%, 35% growth in Q1 and Q2. Q3 was even stronger. But I would say what drove it in Q3, I think, would be a couple things. One is I think we're doing – our teams are doing a nice job scaling the offering, but we're also putting some dedicated resources on there as well. We also see the carriers at the same time seeing leaning into the home opportunity broadly, and so we've been working with them, and we've been helping – we've been putting more resources on them and helping them say, how do we set up this vertical with the specific attributes and characteristics in the workflow that are required for home? We've been doing that. So we've been very pleased with it. I would say it was, you know, the overperformance on home was in part driven by carriers coming on even stronger in the quarter than they anticipated when they told us at the start of the quarter how they were looking, so we're pleased by that. As we look ahead, we see home continue to be our stronger grower than auto in the medium term. I would say 70% was, you know, was very impressive, and I wouldn't put that into your model, Ralph, But I would say having outsized growth from the home vertical, we were in the 30s for the first part of the 30s percent year-on-year growth for Q1 and Q2. We sort of see the home verticals continue to grow nice and strongly going ahead. Just be mindful on the numbers. It's off a relatively small base. So in any given quarter when you have a few things go really well, that can sort of amplify the year-on-year growth, which is what a little bit has happened in Q3. But again, really strong execution by the team. I mean, we're really pleased and we're bullish on homes opportunity as we look ahead.

Great. Thanks, Joseph. Thanks, Jamie.

Your next question comes from the line of Maria Ripps with Canaccord. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Great. Congrats on the strong quarter and thanks for taking my questions. Clearly, you see a strong momentum here existing the year. So as we look ahead to 2027, can you maybe talk about the key growth drivers in addition to a favorable industry backdrop, and how should we think about their relative contributions to growth?

Can you repeat that last part of the question, Marie? You broke up a little. Contributions.

Yeah, as we think about 2027, how should we think about sort of key growth drivers in addition to a favorable industry backdrop and sort of relative contribution to overall growth?

Right.

So you mentioned the favorable backdrop, but we do expect that to persist with carrier underwriting as healthy as it's been, and I think most analysts seeing this soft market cycle extending at least into 2029. And so we feel good about the backdrop for next year. Beyond that, I think we always think about it. There's distribution. And so how do we drive more carrier budget and improve pricing? And that typically is through over the last couple of years, it's been driven through our AI bidding product smart campaigns, which we continue to improve and drive greater adoption of. Most notably, you know, this last quarter, we expanded it to a critical mass of local agents, and we'll continue to roll that out into next year. Then, you know, within the agent population, there's a number of incremental products that we're rolling out as we work to consolidate to be the one-stop growth partner for the local agent. And so we see those starting to get some scale moving into next year. Then over onto the traffic side, as we get more budget, we're able to push that back and compete more aggressively in the traffic landscape, and we continue to expand into more channels, into underpenetrated channels, some higher funnel channels, AI surge, we expect to grow into next year, so we get more traffic to feed that distribution budget. Joseph mentioned non-autos and our expectations for home next year. And then, you know, the other product which we recently launched is Luba. It's a new experience we think will allow us to begin to tap into a new segment of shoppers who are a bit more sort of research-oriented, AI-native shoppers that should help with growth next year as well.

Got it. That's very helpful. And then just in terms of sort of AI agents and your white paper, so as insurance shopping sort of shifts towards AI agents, how should we think about the economics of customer acquisition for your platform? I guess could greater automation improve conversion and acquisition efficiency, or could we see sort of some pressure on the economics as AI platforms essentially take a larger role in driving demand?

Yeah. So I think, you know, when we think about the unit economics, I mean, to put it in context, right now, it's still negligible. It's sort of immaterial in terms of its scale. You know, we get less than 1% of our traffic from LLMs and even less from agentic shoppers. But, you know, it is likely to expect it will – reasonable to expect it will grow over time. So question number one is for us in terms of unit economics is what does it do to volume? Because you have to the extent that agents can shop, reshop with greater frequency and less friction, we actually may see an increase in monetizable events as that happens. And then I think, you know, we have some, I think the jury's out in terms of how exactly the economic model will evolve, but to the extent that these agents are able to do good research and improve the likelihood that the ultimate referral converts into a policy, we could see greater performance from the referrals going out and, in turn, greater monetization.

Got it. That's very helpful. Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Navid Khan with B. Reilly. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

A couple of questions for me. Maybe the first one, just on the sort of, you know, we're hearing some changes to Google search in terms of Google kind of, you know, increasing the coverage And it seems like looking at your numbers doesn't seem to have affected your numbers, or even for the, you know, looking at the guide for the key forces. Maybe just talk about your ability to kind of adapt to Google changes and, you know, how kind of you look at the quality of the leads you get from there directly, and also the diversification in your own traffic. And then I have a follow-up.

I think to begin, we have a very diversified traffic portfolio. Google is a large partner, but we have a very diversified base of traffic to begin with. And I think over the last few years, the segment of Google traffic that's been most impacted has been organic traffic, which for better or worse, and right now it's for better, we've never had much exposure to organic traffic. So we've always been heavily concentrated with paid programmatic advertising. And we've, you know, we have managed to kind of work through all the changes that have occurred with Google to date, and we expect that to persist moving forward. Overall, we see shopping activity relatively stable this year at elevated levels because I think the overall policy value and premiums just remain high. And so people are shopping and re-shopping frequently in response to, I think, the cumulative effect of rate increases over time. And we've seen relative stability over the course of the year.

That's good. Okay. And then I just wanted to touch on this partnership with Vanny Vanny, I guess is how you pronounce it. But I think there's some kind of exclusivity there. What does it cover exactly? Is it for the U.S.? Does it cover PNC or something broader? And what's the duration there? Also, with respect to any kind of revenue generated through such a partnership, how does that – how does the economic compare versus something that you get through the channels? Thank you.

Sure. So the basic premise of their offering is that they provide technology infrastructure and services to help companies of regulated industries Distribute through AI channels, and so they will help build applications and then host infrastructure that provides related services, compliance services, insights, analytical services, and, you know, we have partnered with them on our market, effectively. So, you know, they serve multiple markets geographically and from a vertical standpoint, and the scope of our partnership is to help them distribute their offering to our customers in P&C insurance within the U.S. market. And then Joseph can add it.

It's a multi-year arrangement. Obviously, there's milestones, so the relationship evolves. You know, the economics, you know, I think we were pleased with how the economics worked from our partnership basis. As you might imagine, any partnership, it's not a perfect answer exactly how it compares to current economic expense and how much we sell, but I think we feel very good in the opportunity in the partnership. I think sort of stepping back from the specific range, I think, puts in broader context of our strategy. As we think about bringing more products to carriers, more AI-first products to carriers and agents, how do we go about doing that? Some of those we will certainly be building ourselves when we're doing that. Some of those we'll find companies like Wani Wani would make sense to partner. We can do that as well. Sometimes it's acquisition we involve as well, and investment. So there's a whole range of possibilities, but Waniwani sort of fits into that strategy just sort of to give you sort of the broader context.

Your next question comes from the line of Brian Smillik with J.P. Morgan. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Yeah, hi, everyone. This is Vignesh on for Brian. Thanks for taking my question. And I guess just as you look into 2027, you kind of touched on it, but just a little more color into how the conversations with barriers are kind of shaping up and if you're seeing any changes in kind of appetite and what that broad-based strength kind of looks like. I know you mentioned Ada, you're kind of talked to customers also grew sequentially, so any color in that would be good.

Sure. So thanks for the question. I mean, so I guess as we – maybe we'll start with how we're feeling right now. As I said in our prepared remarks, it's a healthy environment, and we expect that to continue into, you know, not just into next year. We see it's a, you know, sort of relatively old stages of a prolonged soft market cycle. And as you know, in insurance, a soft market cycle is good. You know, the research we referenced in our IR deck shows us going into 2029, several analysts. So we feel very good about that backdrop. As you look at carriers right now, you see carriers broadly healthy, right? They want to grow policies and force. We saw in Q3 eight of our – we had sequential growth in eight of our 10 carriers, top 10 carriers, so we feel really good about that. So if we look into next year, we see that dynamics continuing, and so we see this Fayetteville backdrop, you know, as being a very good time for EverQuote.

Got it. Thank you. And then, I guess, one follow-up on the launch of Luva, I guess, can you kind of talk about maybe how you see monetizing the platform and any sort of maybe milestones to track into next year? Yeah, thanks.

Yeah, so there's a number of ways we will monetize. Depending on the carrier relationship, some will be treated as a commission. Some will be, you know, paid on, you know, effectively a performance on the placement of the policy. And there may be some referral-based models as well. So it will be a hybrid from a monetization standpoint, but that's really based on what suits the carrier for this channel. So, you know, we launched, we're all, what, five or six days old at this point, but some of the things that we'll be looking at as we progress into next year is obviously further development of the product in terms of the carrier panel, the capabilities, and then adoption. So this is really meant to access a segment of shopper that wants a different kind of comparison experience that's built around conversation, education, a really deeper understanding of their coverage and their policy options. And it was designed from day one around the needs of consumers using LLMs and conversational AI and built on top of infrastructure that can be leveraged to serve agentic commerce. And so we're going to be looking for arrival specifically through those channels to ensure that the sort of intended segment that we are trying to serve is actually accessing the product and getting the value.

Your next question comes from the line of Jason Schreier with Craig Hellem. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Great. Thank you, guys. So can you just talk about the progression of the AI partnerships, just where you're at in terms of rolling out the partnerships that you talked about on the call, and then maybe what kind of a pipeline you're developing to extend to additional AI partners?

Yeah, just to clarify, are you talking on the carrier side or on the platform side?

More on the platform side. You talked about meta and entropic and open and stuff. Thanks.

Yeah, so we have relationships across the board. I think that each of these platforms is still trying to learn their way into our category, particularly into the distribution landscape within insurance. And so we've been having good, productive conversations with them to try and educate them about some of the unique characteristics of our market. And, you know, our expectation is that we'll be able to kind of build relationships that will sort of give us certain access and ability to really partner with them over time.

Appreciate that. Maybe one for Joseph. So you just called out the expectation for a downtick in VMM Q3 to Q4. You said that would be at least in part driven, you know, by the move into, you know, a gen tick. Here's what your perspective is over the next couple of years. Do you think that VMM, do you think those will remain stable, or is there potential for upside or downside to VMM as Agentec becomes more and more a part of workflows?

Sure. So, great question. So, let me give you some context. So, when you think about the investments we're making in our AR offerings, one of the areas those investments show up is in the traffic line. So, again, different than some of the investments we've talked about in AI investments previously, where they're showing up in driving efficiencies in the OpEx line, and we're able to drive a lot of increase in leverage through those investments in AI. Different with our AI and the investments we're making in agentic traffic sources, just like any new traffic source, those new channels do not perform as well in the early days. And, again, these particular traffic sources are new. They're still evolving for us and for the industry as a whole. So as we look at that area, we're very bullish on the opportunity. You know, you're seeing in Q4, we're making investments in these traffic channels. The Louvre is part of that. Those will continue into the first part of next year. You know, as we look at the VMM margin, what I would sort of say is if, you know, I would look at Q4 as a reasonable proxy for next year as sort of a starting point. We'll see how it evolves from there. But I guess that could give you a high-level view on it from the VMM margin level.

Great caller. Thank you. Thanks, Seth.

Your next question comes from the line of Jed Kelly with Oppenheimer. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hey, great. Thanks for taking my question. Another nice quarter with a strong free cash flow. I think, you know, ever since I've known you, so it's been almost 10 years, maybe over 10 years, you know, the company at its core has always been machine learning, AI. So it seems like you've got a pretty big advantage harnessing this technology relative to your competitors. How should we think about, you know, is there an opportunity here to sort of maybe consolidate the market, gain more distribution, you know, accelerate share gains? You know, how should we see that in terms of using this to maybe drive better unit economics from the carriers or, you know, gain more market share? Just can you talk about how we kind of think about your ability to use this solution and just accelerate share and drive better unit economics for the business?

Yeah, thanks, Jed. So to your point, I mean, for since the company's inception, I think one of the value adds we've been able to bring to carriers is being, you know, we tend to be kind of at the leading edge within our industry in terms of performance marketing and customer acquisition in digital channels and through the use of whatever the latest technology and data available is. And, you know, that sort of represents, that has driven the growth that has gotten us to this point. And now what's, you know, we are now in the early stages of the evolution to kind of the next phase of things. And I think the same pattern is likely to play out again, and we're really leaning into it, right? We are trying to stay very much in close contact with all the, you know, with the AI platforms and with the carriers to help start to bridge the gap between what is a very fragmented, very opaque and nuanced end market, and these platforms that really are just trying to deliver maximum value to their consumers. And I think if we can maintain a strong position in helping bridge that gap, there's going to be just a tremendous amount of opportunity along the way for us to build products and deliver traffic in a way that really benefits both sides of that marketplace.

Got it. And then just around capital allocation, I see you're implementing a share buyback at that just given the current valuation. But does it make sense maybe given where valuations are now for some of your other competitors? Does it ever make sense to explore more M&A versus buying back stock where it's hard to see if the market's going to give you credit for that? But any thoughts on that? Thanks.

Sure. Thanks, Chad. So when we think about capital allocation, it continues to be the same as we've said before, which is there's three ways we think about it, right? Just first is we want to make sure we have a fortress balance sheet. As you think about the deepening our partnerships with our carrier partners, they will want to see a partner who's got depth on the balance sheet and will be here. And so I think that certainly is important to us. And it's always has been even more important now as we think about these longer term relationships. The second is, you know, M&A and investments, right? We see this as ways. We did the Wani-Wani was an example of an investment. We think about M&A as an opportunity as well. And M&A is something we certainly were looking at. But what form it will take, we will look. We will see over time. But again, whether it's investments for M&A, it's all about how we will build our TAM over time as the world evolves into this AI-first world. So that would be the second. And buybacks, you know, for us, we can do all three. Great. We are the cash flow generation that gives us the flexibility and capacity to all of the above. On buybacks, we see it as, you know, it's opportunistic utilization. You know, it also helps us offset employee dilution, which happens on an annual basis, and we think that's wholesome.

Thank you, and great quarter.

Thank you very much. We appreciate it.

Your next question comes from the line of Gregory Peters with Raymond James. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Well, good afternoon. I guess most of the questions that I had in mind have been asked, but maybe you can just remind me, you know, during your commentary, you talked about the vendor services contract that was non-renewed. Maybe you could just give, remind me of the details behind that, what's going on there.

Sure, sure. So this was a This relationship began to about a year ago. It was sort of a new traffic opportunity, a branded traffic opportunity, and it was sort of a multi-year arrangement, a five-year arrangement. As we progressed into that arrangement, we realized it was not performing to the way we liked. It was also distracting from other traffic operations. So we decided to end that particular contract. We still have a relationship with that brand, and we continue to work with them, but the exact arrangement didn't make sense. And so it was a five-year arrangement that we cut it short. We took the charge in the period. It was reflected in our adjustment to net income. This was sort of a very unique kind of situation for us. We had not done something like this before, and it was something we tried, and obviously we reassessed when it wasn't working the way we expected.

Thanks for that caller. Can I go back to the SPART campaigns? You know, I guess I'm trying to come up with this, you know, trying to, I believe you're helping improve the conversion rates, and yet you say you're doing it, and your revenue results reflect it, but I don't, I don't, I don't know if there's some statistics you can add to your disclosure that will help us understand, hey, when the carriers use our smart campaigns, their conversion rates improve by 2x or 3x or something like that. But any color you can provide on that would be helpful.

Yeah, we've shared case studies in the past, Greg. I mean, it always depends on where the carrier's starting point is. But in some of the case studies we've shared in the past, I think some of the numbers we've used have been double-digit or 20% performance improvements in a controlled test as a result of testing smart campaigns against whatever legacy bidding they were doing prior to that.

Okay. Thanks for the answers.

Thank you, Greg. Appreciate it.

There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back to management for closing remarks. Thank you.

And thanks, everyone, for joining us. To close out, I want to first thank the EverQuote team for delivering yet another excellent quarter with record financial performance. We continue executing our strategy, deepening customer relationships, and driving further innovation as we lead P&C insurance distribution into the AI era. We look forward to sharing further updates in the coming months as we build on this momentum. Thanks, all.

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