EverQuote (EVER) Q2 2026 earnings call transcript

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 ever quote second quarter twenty twenty six earnings call. We will be discussing the results announced in our press release issue today after market close. With me on the call this afternoon are Jamie Mendel, Ever quotes CEO and Joseph Sanborn, Ever quotes CFO 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 third quarter of twenty six.

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-gap 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 gap to non-gap 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'll now turn the call over to Jamie.

Thank you, Sarah, and thank you all for joining us today. We continue to execute well and deliver strong results. In Q2, we grew revenue 25% year over year to $195.1 million and grew adjusted EBITDA 37% year over year to a record $30.1 million. Importantly, we achieved these results while continuing to advance our strategy, unlock new growth levers, and extend our market leadership position. We continue to experience a healthy market backdrop for both auto and homeowners insurance. As carriers remain profitable and hungry for growth. Against this backdrop, carriers are turning to ever quote as a trusted partner to help them grow policies and force. In Q2, we further broaden carrier demand, including a ramp with one major carrier that returned to the marketplace as expected.

We also grew local agent demand for referrals to record high levels, while increasing the number of products per agent as we advance our one-stop growth partner strategy with local agents. Both carrier and agent revenue reached record high levels in the quarter. Additionally, our home vertical continues to perform well, growing 35% year over year in Q2, also to record levels. While we execute on behalf of customers, we are also investing to extend our AI leadership position in the market. Our smart campaign's AI bidding solution continues to scale, supporting customers' aggressive customer acquisition goals by helping them deploy marketing budgets more effectively and efficiently. Seven of our top 10 carriers now use smart campaigns, and in Q2, the amount of revenue flowing through the product increased by over 100% versus the same period last year.

Also in Q2, we released our agent-facing version of smart campaigns to the first cohort of local agents. As smart campaigns become our customers' dominant bidding approach, we are strengthening these relationships by embedding our technology into their core workflows and achieving deeper data integrations all while helping customers achieve their growth goals.

Within our walls, use of AI for everything from coding to automating operational tasks to prototyping products has reached an inflection point. As our teams integrate AI into their daily workflows to drive greater productivity and velocity. We are seeing daily active use pervasive across our corporate staff, and within engineering, we are exceeding industry benchmarks with a 25% measured increase in efficiency. On a daily basis, I am impressed by yet another creative high-value AI derived output from an ever-quote team member. To name just a few, recent examples include AI agents designed to emulate human shopper personas and identify friction points in our web experiences, as well as upgrades to our AI traffic bidding platform which put us on a path to increasingly agentic traffic operations.

This trend of delivering innovative products at a faster pace will only increase from here. As evidenced by our financial results, our consistent strong execution on behalf of customers has made us a trusted growth partner of choice for the largest carriers and thousands of local agents. We continue to integrate AI across our operations and our products and are emerging as an AI leader within our industry. From this position of strength, we see an opportunity to do more to support customers while unlocking new growth vectors for the business. Initially, we will focus on two areas. One, amplifying visibility with consumers through new products that are purpose-built for AI search and agentic commerce. And two, building AI native growth solutions for carriers and agents, which allow them to derive benefits of AI without having to build and manage as much of the technology in-house.

With our rich AI heritage and deep customer relationships, we are uniquely positioned to lead the PNC distribution sector through its transition into the AI era. We look forward to sharing more details of these newer developments in the coming months. I have never been more excited about where we are and where we are going. We have a unique blend of talent, market leadership, ability to innovate, trusted customer relationships, and financial strength. This positions us to build on recent progress, expand our competitive mode, and create a multi-billion-dollar market leader with durable long-term growth. I will now turn the call over to Joseph, who will discuss our financial results and outlook.

Thank you, Jamie, and good afternoon, everyone. Q2 marked another positive quarter forever quote with strong revenue and adjusted EBITDA growth. We grew revenue 25% and adjusted EBITDA 37% year over year. We also drove record variable marketing dollars or VMD and record adjusted EBITDA while at the same time generating strong cash flow.

Now let's turn to the details of the second quarter. Total revenue grew 25% year over year to 195.1 million. Revenue from our auto insurance vertical increased to 172.1 million in Q2 up 23% year over year. We continue to benefit from our broad and differentiated distribution with growth across carriers and agents, including a large carrier ramping, as Jamie mentioned. We also are delivering on the operational plan we've discussed to scale beyond the auto vertical. In Q2, revenue from our home insurance vertical grew 35% to a record 23 million as we capitalize on strong monetization across high quality traffic sources and secured increased budget from key carriers. VMD increased to 56.9 million in the second quarter, up 25% from the prior year period.

Variable marketing margin or VMM was 29.2% for the quarter. Turning to operating expenses in the bottom line, in the second quarter, we grew gap net income to 19.2 million, up from 14.7 million in the prior year period. Q2 adjusted EBITDA increased 37% from the prior year period to 30.1 million, representing a 15.4% adjusted EBITDA margin. Cash operating expenses, which excludes advertising spend and certain non-cash and other chargers, where 26.8 million in Q2 up slightly from Q1, as expected. We delivered strong operating cash flow of 24.3 million for the second quarter. In Q2, we repurchased 578,000 shares, totaling approximately $9 million under our share repurchase program. In aggregate, under this program, we have repurchase 2.5 million shares, totaling $50 million.

We are pleased with the results and expect our board will revisit authorizing a new program later this year as part of our ongoing review of capital allocation. We ended the period with no debt and cash and cash equivalents of $192 million.

In summary, our Q2 results reflect continued strong execution. We diversified our revenue across additional carriers in the quarter, further scaled our home vertical, and expanded our AI capabilities to drive innovation for our customers and deliver efficiencies within our own operations.

Turning to guidance for the third quarter of 2026, we expect revenue to be between $198 and $208 million, representing 17% year over year growth at the midpoint. We expect VMD to be between $56 and $59 million, representing 15% year over year growth at the midpoint. And we expect adjusted EBITDA to be between $28 and $31 million, representing 18% year over year growth at the midpoint.

Looking to the remainder of the year, we are seeing a healthy environment as carriers focus on growing policies and forests, and as they choose EBITDA to achieve their goals. We are executing well and remain confident in our ability to achieve $1 billion in annual revenues on the timeline we initially communicated to investors last November, while also generating strong cash flow. We expect to reach this goal by first, driving better performance to gain share, second, obtaining bigger scale as we bring more provider, budget and traffic onto our platform.

Third, delivering a broader portfolio of solutions to our clients, and finally achieving greater operating efficiency to investments in AI automation. As Jamie mentioned, we are increasing our focus on how to build upon our existing success and pursue incremental opportunities to propel our business beyond our $1 billion revenue target by delivering new AI-first products that add incremental value to our customers. Consistent with our prior commentary, we are making target investments in the second half of this year to develop and bring these new solutions to market. Additionally, we are pursuing select strategic commercial partnerships with AI-first companies to complement our own internal product development and capabilities.

We look forward to providing further updates as our initiatives progress throughout the year. In conclusion, it was a positive quarter underpinned by strong fundamentals and a focus strategy. The strength of our ongoing financial performance reflects that our strategy to be a trusted growth partner for PNC insurance providers is working. We are executing amidst a favorable market backdrop as carriers continue to shift spend to digital channels. We are well positioned as an AI beneficiary as we bring both new value to customers and drive incremental efficiencies throughout our business.

We remain committed to our previously stated path to 1 billion annual revenue with strong cash flow generation. We have built a business with strong underlying fundamentals and a fortress balance sheet that allows us to invest for the long term and capture new growth opportunities while continuing to drive value for our customers and shareholders alike. Jamie and I will now take your questions.

Sure. Thanks, Ralph. So as it relates to the carrier market, the market remains healthy as it has been throughout the year so far, gear at carrier combined ratios in the 80s for the most part among the major carriers. And that's true across auto and now the homeowner segment two. So I would say carriers remain very hungry for growth. If there's one thing that we're starting to feel a bit more as the year progresses is kind of equal appetite for homeowners growth as there was for auto growth coming into the year. And you see that starting to be reflected in some of the strength in our home vertical this quarter and we expect that to persist into the back part of the year.

Then to your second question as it relates to our AI bidding platform, we have automated a lot of our traffic bidding over the years and we've talked about it many times before. A lot of that was done through the application of machine learning to automate decisions as it relates to bidding for traffic. And now what we're beginning to do is overlay more sort of a gentic action on top of the ML bidding that has been occurring for a long time. And so this is now getting into like deeper automation of a lot of the operations, which will, you know, has historically, every time we do something like this, we see the benefit both in the effectiveness of the bidding, which would flow through in VMD, but also in the efficiency because we can sort of manage a larger traffic portfolio with less human intervention needed.

Great.

Sure. So as it relates to smart campaigns, there have been a number of developments over the last quarter. You know, on the carrier side, we're continuing to evolve to our smart campaigns, 3.0, which has more features built into it to improve the efficiency of the model. But the bigger change of this past quarter was introducing smart campaigns to agents for the first time. So agents are now able to bid more dynamically than they have been able to in the past.

It's early days, but the early data that we're getting would suggest significant conversion rate improvements for the agents who have opted into to that product. So good progress on that front. With respect to the marketing mix, I guess the change that we've been talking about since the beginning of the year is the ramp of new traffic programs and traffic channels, particularly into some of the more higher funnel areas. So that continues. I wouldn't say there's been any, you know, change that that is material or noteworthy over the last quarter. But we continue to work to broaden and expand that traffic portfolio, particularly into these higher funnel channels.

Yeah, sure. So we have, we have not experienced any direct effect to our paid search results. And, you know, what we, but you've got this large source of traffic growing in VLMs, which to us represents incremental opportunity because we have never historically invested in or had a significant amount of organic traffic to begin with. So our paid traffic remains healthy and strong. And now we've been making investments over the last year or so to really begin to access the AI search traffic more systematically. And there's a number of ways that you can do that. One is through more of a traditional sort of content strategy. So developing answers to the questions that people may pose through the LOMs.

The second is through paid advertising. And you have platforms like OpenAI now opening up to paid advertising. And the third is through technical integrations. So we did, you know, we launched our chat GPT app last quarter and it's, you know, it's getting some traffic. But it's the combination of those things and how they work together to meet the needs of the LOMs that ultimately is going to allow us to start to tap into that traffic any more material way and could become material over time, particularly as those platforms continue to grow.

Sure. So there's sort of two sides of this. One is more on the consumer or shopper side. One is more on the provider side. I started to get at the consumer side with my response to Nevada, but you know, we see an opportunity to really amplify our visibility with consumers through new products that are really purpose-built for AI search and agentic commerce. And so as that begins to grow, obviously a large pool of insurance intent exists there. There's a number of ways to access that traffic, which I just referenced. But they all require the build of certain assets that meet the specific needs of the LOMs. And we're making investments in these assets to become a distribution point of choice for the LOMs within our vertical market.

So that's the high level on that one. And we will have more specifics to share in the coming months. But then to go to the other side of the marketplace, as you look at the provider landscape, you know, we operate any market that is regulated. It's okay. It's nuanced in many respects. And so horizontal solutions often don't work well for the insurance market. And we believe that within our market, we are really leading the charge with respect to the adoption of AI and understanding of how to deploy it, how to build with it. And with that, we see an opportunity to do more to support our customers. I think we're developing a suite of offerings which will allow them to derive benefits of AI without having to build and manage as much of the technology in-house.

And so, you know, the basic idea is to roll out products like Smart Campaigns, which are consistent with our vision of helping carriers and agents grow, but really with a heightened focus on applying AI to the most relevant and impactful distribution use cases of our customers. And so, that could range from marketing. You mentioned conversion. That would be in scope. Basically, anything within that distribution chain where we feel we can help our customers be more effective.

Then Maria, maybe to address your point with regards to how do you think about revenues for these areas? We're very excited about both these areas, right? We think they're going to provide new opportunities to bring consumers in as the traffic landscapes evolve increasingly to working with large-language models, even in insurance. We think we're very well positioned for that. If that happens over time. And we think the providers are really looking for us and turning to actually coming to us saying, hey, how can you help us grow with new products? So, we're excited by these things. In terms of near-term impact, we don't view the revenue as material for this year in these new offerings. We use a period of really testing and innovation and bringing these things to market.

And really going, particularly on the new products for providers, there's a period we're really trying to invest in spending time with them as we bring these products for to say, how do these work for you doing the innovation? Just the same way we rolled out Smart Campaigns, we did that with the carriers and agents. You'll see similar similar profiles here as well as we go to market.

Thanks, Greg. It's Joseph here. Maybe I'd say is, you know, we're giving you details on something we foreshadowed in the start of this year. This is very much executing as we thought we would as the year progressed. You know, we said that guidance per Q3 a step up of roughly a million, a quarter, an op-x for Q3. And you'll probably in from there, you know, probably a half million more in Q4. Again, very consistent. We said at the start of the year, some op-x is relatively flat on the step up in the second half of the year. You know, these investments were now sharing the details of you. We've been planning these and working on these for some time.

And that's reflected in what we sort of have out there at this point. And I guess the only thing I'd add is more broadly, you know, we are also driving efficiency with a lot of the automation, a lot of the work that we're doing internally, right? And, you know, I think we talked about this last quarter, but we've doubled revenue over the last couple of years while keeping op-x flat. It is coming up a bit, but we have religion around efficiency. And so we have good visibility on, you know, the token usage and the expenses associated with it. We have controls in place. And as that ramps, we are also able to, you know, automate and kind of manage expenses elsewhere.

Maybe Greg, the last thing I'll ask you is just as you think through what we said at the start of the year, we said, hey, soon leave it down, margins will rise roughly 100 basis points this year. You know, we still are still saying they'll rise roughly 100 basis points this year because the op-x investment we're seeing in the second half is sort of, you know, as we expect this to start of the year. Let's give you a little more context from a model with respect.

And, you know, I'm, you know, was, I was chuckling when I was in the market and, you know, considering where they were just a couple of years ago. And as a backdrop, I'm just curious, are you seeing the fact that they're willing to grow? Are you seeing any more opportunities for, are they willing to pay you more for helping them to grow? Or, you know, or is it still, you're still getting sort of the same amount on a per-close basis? You know, some, so many detail around that would be helpful. Yeah, I think there's, there's two noticeable differences. One is, isn't there willingness to pay? And so, you know, there is, there is higher willingness to pay this year than there has been, you know, in recent years.

There are certain carriers that are really leaning in heavily, you know, because they're feeling a tremendous amount of pressure to grow. So, and that's reflected in the pricing within the marketplace. We've seen that to come up quite a bit. The other place we see at Greg is in their willingness to try new things.

So, you know, as an example, we are, you know, smart campaigns is a good example. I know it's when we often use, but there is a certain amount of data sharing and trust associated with a customer adopting smart campaigns. And, you know, we've been working for years to get our customers on that product. And this year, you know, for the first time, because they are experiencing a lot of pressure to grow, they are, for the first time, willing to test it, willing to provide the data and the integrations that we need to make it work. And that's been the case with that product. It's been the case with a number of other products we've brought to market, but the carriers are just a lot more open and collaborative in working with us to help them grow than, you know, than we certainly saw during the harder years to market.

Maybe I'll start out if you want to add on. So I guess I'd say, you know, VMM for the quarter was enough with the high 20s. And that's, and maybe I'd even take a step back to say, on a day-to-day basis, we do not solve for VMM margin. We solve for VMD. What we've seen over time is what correlates with the highest VMD is actually a VMM in the high 20s. In any given quarter can be higher or lower, lower based on things we control or things we don't control at the advertising environment, but generally it's in the high 20s correlates with the highest VMD from our experience.

One of the things that I would say that it allows us to continue to do that is we continue to get Jamie talked about smart campaigns that brings in more data into our marketplaces. We bring more data into the marketplaces helps us be more efficient with traffic acquisition. That certainly feeds into that as well in our ability to maintain and drive those VMM margins and the high 20s and maintain them there in additional color.

I think that that more or less covers it. It is certainly a competitive traffic landscape out there, but we have adapted to it and we've been able to drive a good deal of efficiency through our bidding technology. And we're also expanding into other channels as we mentioned earlier. And those channels are not industry specific channels, so they're not subject to the same kind of competitive pressure as say insurance search or something like that.

Sure. So thanks for the question. I guess when we think about capital allocation, there's sort of three things. We've talked about just to remind folks, one is updating a sportless balance sheet is critical for our business. We think long term and some of the investments we're making in the time horizons for return. Second is obviously buybacks. We've done about 50, we've done 50 million of buybacks since we did it last August.

And the third is on M&A. When we look at M&A, maybe start with two things. One is we don't see a need for M&A to achieve our path to a billion dollars in revenue that we talked about in our November call. As we talked about our prepared remarks, we're still in a path to achieve that in two to three years and now 15 to 27 months, nine months into making the commitment. But we see potentially an opportunity with M&A to accelerate our opportunities in the P&C landscapes. As we look across the market, we think there's a real opportunity for us. And it falls in a couple few areas I touch on. We talked about new products for carriers and agents that grow their business.

M&A can certainly be part of that. How do we bring new areas of care agents grow? And that could be part of an M&A strategy. We also look at we've had really good success with our non-auto vertical of home. How do we continue to keep growing the non-auto verticals? Could be another area for M&A. And the third could be around data. How do we leverage data within our marketplace and provide new insights that overlay with the data we already have? So this could be some of the areas we look at. What I would say more is a sort of stepping back a little bit further is we think it's a market landscape. We are really coming out as a leader in this space, pulling away from the pack.

And as we do that, we're seeing more opportunities. Why are we seeing more opportunities? Because a lot of the private company and sure tech that are out there, you have management teams who are passionate about being in this space, but they want to see an opportunity part of someone who's doing that. We're having more and more of those conversations. So as we look at using our capital for M&A, obviously a key part of it is talent as well. So we'll see others in folds over in the coming quarters. But we certainly see it as another growth lever first to consider.

They're progressing as planned. I think we've said before, we don't expect the new channels to kind of materially impact one way or the other, the kind of medium term VMM operating point. As Joseph referenced, it's really not actually even a metric that we managed to. It's kind of an output metric. We're trying to maximize the variable marketing dollars. But the channels are they're progressing as planned. Our prime objective right now is keeping our carriers and agents fed. Growth is really the name of the game. In those new channels, we're able to access some volume that's contributing to growth. I don't think we would look to trade off growth for that for any kind of margin at this point.

We're just continuing to look for maximum variable marketing dollars and serving the customer need to grow.

So maybe a little bit more on just what your aspirations are for growing home. And then how well are you able to leverage the product and the tech that you've created on the auto side and deploy that to further scale opportunities in home? Thanks.

Yeah. So we see a really nice opportunity in home. The vertical has been performing very well. 35% this quarter year on year to record levels. We've long said that we expect home growth to outpace auto growth, just given where it started and given how it's sort of a little bit behind auto in terms of its maturity and its digital evolution. But a lot of the growth to date has been driven by applying a lot of our best practices and our technology and our traffic operations from auto to home. So a lot of that does translate. That being said, I think there are some things we can continue to do to customize that homeowners buying experience to make it more tailored to the vertical and improve performance in doing so.

But if you take a step back, I mean, the vertical, the market right now is very healthy. The carriers are quite profitable.

And we've now got some big carriers paying attention to home. It seems more than they have in the past, particularly as the auto market gets quite competitive. So all signs right now point to continued growth in that home vertical.

And maybe Jason is one of the sort of perspective to give in terms of the size of the home opportunity. So roughly it's 10% for 10, 11% right now, the rest being auto for us. If you look at the broader PNC landscape, it's roughly for every $2 of auto that is $1 of home. So between 50% and where we are today, we think there's a 10%, we think there's a lot of growth opportunity more broadly in the market. Not all home will be home opportunities be relevant to digital, but we see the significant upside in that market opportunity, which it allows us to feel very bullish about the investments we're making here and how we'll impact us in the medium and longer term to becoming a real growth driver for the business.

No. No. I don't know what more to say. There's nothing we don't see anything that would have that impact.

So we're the Google Arbitration. I think every law firm in the country has probably reached out to us as well as every investment bank is trying to do products in the area. So we're aware of it. No, we'll evaluate as we do other things as well. So really nothing to comment on it, but we're well aware of what's going on out there.

Thanks. I keep coming back to Jeff for us as we solve for maximizing VMD dollars. And right now with what we're seeing, we sort of see high 20s as sort of place that will normalize. Will for VMM margin, you know, there'll be variability quarter to quarter certainly. You know, we had Q4 of last year. We made a conscious choice after three quarters in a row of really strong start. We say we made investments in Q4 last year. We consciously brought it down as we tested a lot of new channels. But for us, we view it as we sort of see in the high 20s, you know, is where it'll be. But again, I come back to we don't.

It's an output metric. It's not the way we run the business to drive VMD dollars in a sustainable and durable way. So what we don't do is we often, we do not go and chase the very VMD dollar. We don't do a sustainable everything spot through in terms of let's just not make the quarter. Let's think about how we're building durability in the model over time.

Thank you. And thanks everyone for joining us today. To close out, I just want to thank the ever quote team for delivering yet another excellent quarter. It's strong growth, record adjusted EBITDA. We're continuing to execute well against the backdrop of healthy customer demand as we're building momentum in both home and in auto. We're making great progress across the number of goals. So we deliver superior performance for our carriers and as we get more value from AI in our operations and in our products and as we diversify our customer base and deepen our customer relationships.

Looking forward to sharing further updates with you in the coming months as we build on this momentum. This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.