Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Cars.com first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, all lines are in listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. This call is being recorded on Thursday, May 7th of 2026. I would now like to turn the conference over to Katherine Chen, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for the Cars.com Inc. first quarter 2026 conference call. With me this morning are Tobias Hartmann, CEO, and Sonia Jain, CFO. Toby will start by discussing business highlights from our first quarter. Sonia will discuss our financial results in greater detail, along with our outlook. We'll finish the call with Q&A. Before I turn the call over to Toby, I'd like to draw your attention to our forward-looking statements and the description and definition of non-GAAP financial measures, which can be found in our presentation. We will be discussing certain non-GAAP financial measures, including Adjusted EBITDA, Adjusted EBITDA margin, Adjusted Operating expenses, Adjusted Ne t Income, and Free Cash Flow .
Reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found in the financial tables included with our earnings press release and in the appendix of our presentation. Any forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties. For more information, please refer to the risk factors included in our SEC filings, including those in our most recently filed 10-K, which is available on the IR section of our website. We assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. Now, I'll turn the call over to Toby.
Thank you, Katherine, and thank you to everyone joining us to review first quarter 2026 results. On our call in February, we set forth near-term goals to better realize the potential of our business and put Cars.com on a stronger growth and value creation trajectory. We have made solid progress against those objectives in Q1 and early Q2 as we build a leading automotive marketplace experience. First, we delivered on our financial commitments. Q1 revenue of $180.2 million was toward the high end of guidance and the third consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth. Adjusted EBITDA margin of 28.3% exceeded guidance by over a full percentage point. Free cash flow remains strong, up 42% year-over-year and reflecting higher conversion from EBITDA. Second, we have taken immediate cost actions.
We closely examine operations to identify efficiencies and opportunities to reshape our organization into more nimble, marketplace-focused teams. During this process, we identified $25 million-$30 million of recurring annualized operating cost savings to create a healthier foundation to support future growth. Third, we are leveraging existing assets and data to rapidly launch new features that improve our marketplace value. Cars.com Model Context Protocol integrations for Agentic AI platforms and conversational capabilities for our Carson shopping assistant are examples where we have adapted to match new shopping behavior. Consumers were more than 4x as likely to submit a lead after having a conversation with Carson, demonstrating our efficacy at stimulating purchase intent. These are positive and necessary steps to start the year and reinforce our confidence in our 2026 growth guidance.
We also increased our 2026 share repurchase target to $90 million to further enhance shareholder value creation. Overall, the start of the year has been productive, and the teams have moved with speed to secure wins. In terms of our three 2026 initiatives, we have pushed hard on controllables such as cost containment. Other changes, like the green shoots in product and marketplace, are compelling, though will take some time to mature. We are clear on the strategy that we need to execute for the rest of the year. Historically, we have grown our product as distinct and loosely affiliated pillars. Moving forward, to truly maximize our value, we must integrate into one interconnected marketplace-centric ecosystem. For car seekers, we will offer relevant and desirable listings across marketplace and dealer websites, trusted data insights, and an AI-first user experience.
For car sellers, our combined marketplace and appraisal capabilities will evolve into an essential resource for used car insights. Dealers and Original Equipment Manufacturer will continue to benefit from our scaled in-market audience, but with even better ROI based on our unique first-party retail signals across marketplace, websites, and media. Our marketplace model will drive vehicle transactions at scale by focusing on these differentiators. Investing in product is key to powering our marketplace flywheel and long-term growth. Let me give you some examples of our accelerated product output in the first four months. Starting with AI, Model Context Protocol integrations are helping our discoverability on leading agentic AI platforms such as ChatGPT. Consumers can now browse our marketplace inventory directly with a native Large Language Model environment before submitting leads on Cars.com. This is added value for existing marketplace dealers who are eager to tap into agentic commerce.
LLMs are still sub 1% of our traffic, and we are well positioned to benefit as these platforms grow. Turning to our own platform, Conversational Carson is a positive step towards continued personalization of the marketplace shopping experience. Finally, the Cars.com Dealer app just launched in April, putting a mobile command center in the hands of marketplace dealers. Early features include AI-generated summaries of performance metrics, lead follow-up alerts, and pricing intelligence. We believe our app has the broadest analytics set among our competitors, translating to the best ROI on every sales appointment and wholesale transaction. We expect greater product development velocity will continue to deliver a steady and diverse cadence of future releases. Cross-pollination, such as bringing Accu-Trade data into marketplace listings, will be an increasing focus in the second half of the year. Turning to the remaining initiatives, Sonia will offer more cost detail in her remarks.
The actions we took in April support our stated intention to grow Adjusted EBITDA at a faster rate than revenue. We have also been clear that we must operate with better processes and organizational structure to successfully execute our marketplace strategy and grow Lifetime Value. From a go-to-market perspective, new product bundles will help clearly articulate platform value. Our products will be packaged according to integrated value delivery, which we expect to drive faster adoption than selling individual point solutions. For example, our data shows that customers with both Accu-Trade and the Cars.com marketplace see inventory terms speed up by an average of six d ays. A combined marketplace and appraisal offering would not only drive dealership gross profits, but also eliminate the paradox of choice for a customer facing too many a la carte options.
We have reorganized the sales team accordingly to break down product-based silos, eliminate duplication, and make the sales process simpler for dealers. Combined with our ongoing localization efforts, we feel front-footed in our ability to increase overall sales productivity. For our current customers, we are fully focused on enhanced value delivery. Our leads and connections already influence more than 30% of our customers' vehicle sales. We will keep pressing this advantage with a balanced approach to top and lower funnel activities that maximizes ROI on our platform. We are committed to operating a scaled platform, so metrics like traffic and Unique Visitors may move depending on quarterly marketing mix. Most recently, Q1 traffic and UVs were pressured by a tough year-over-year comp from pull-forward tariff demand in the broader industry in 2025. Setting aside this one-time impact, our underlying direct traffic remains strong.
Organic traffic was close to 60% of total mix in Q1, which is similar to our historical average, even with the advent of LLMs. Direct traffic conversion was also up meaningfully year-over-year and reflected in robust lead volume growth. Longer term, we have confidence that our strong brand, improving user experience, and listings inventory will fuel continued marketplace strength. To recap, we delivered against revenue expectations and outperformed on Adjusted EBITDA. We are changing the way we operate to drive stronger financial results in operating metrics. We are executing to transform into the leading trusted automotive marketplace, connecting consumers, dealers, and OEMs. In the process, we will create meaningful and sustainable shareholder value. Sonia will discuss our financial results and outlook. Sonia?
Thank you, Toby. The first quarter was another positive step in improving our growth trajectory and profitability. Revenue was in line with expectations, while Adjusted EBITDA beat our guidance range by over a full point. As Toby stated, we are focused on our marketplace-centric Strategy and are pleased with the performance of this core piece of our business. As you read in our April announcement, we are focused on more product integration and innovation while working diligently to enable operational efficiencies. These cost benefits are beginning to manifest in our results, while revenue-driving measures will compound and support accelerated growth as we move through the year. Now to discuss the quarter. First quarter revenue of $180.2 million was up 1% year-over-year, above the midpoint of our guidance range.
Dealer revenue growth was driven by enhanced value delivery across websites and Marketplace, as well as dealer count growth, which was up 140 customers year-over-year based on core Marketplace strength. We're encouraged by steady Marketplace improvement, given its criticality to our strategy and importance to our revenue, profitability, and cash flow profile. Average Revenue Per Dealer of $2,473 was consistent on both a year-over-year and sequential basis. Over the medium to long term, we expect this metric to continue growing based on underlying value delivery and increased product adoption. More immediately, we've made good progress in aligning Marketplace and website packaging to our value proposition. For example, in Marketplace, Premium Plus, our top-tier offering, has grown to nearly 7% of subscribers, and we anticipate reaching 15% adoption across Marketplace customers before year-end.
For new and renewing website customers, subscription demand for our top website packages remains steady. Our work on Core Web Vitals has improved site speed for many of our customers by nearly 30%. We have also released timely features like improved EV data, which is particularly important as dealers are now selling a growing supply of used EVs without the benefit of government incentives. Though dealer media performance continues to temper otherwise favorable ARPD drivers, the planned refresh of our media suite, including AI VIN videos, should set us up for better traction in the second half of the year. In addition to these product-specific refinements, our new Marketplace first approach requires our distinct product pillars to evolve into more integrated subscription offerings. With these integrated offerings, we are entering a new phase of our cross-selling strategy, which we expect will deliver a distinct lever for ARPD growth.
We'll share more updates on our work here in the coming months. Turning to dealer count. While our customer base was up year-over-year from Marketplace net adds, on a quarter-over-quarter basis, we experienced some pressure in solutions that resulted in overall dealer count decline. Recall, the website business has grown significantly over the last few years as we became a preferred OEM vendor and gained share. We're now in a different phase of growth that is more oriented around innovation and package value versus pure market share gains. Recent investments that we've made to improve technical performance on site speed, security, and other metrics are garnering favorable customer feedback. Rounding out the solutions discussion, AccuTrade subscribers were down sequentially. As you heard Toby mention, we expect AccuTrade sales to improve as it becomes more fully integrated with our Marketplace.
The strength of dealer revenue and more specifically Marketplace is encouraging. We expect this momentum to drive total revenue growth in 2026 and balance softness in OEM advertising. In the first quarter, OEM and national revenue was down $2 million year-over-year. There have been ongoing signals that OEM budgets are in flux. As an example, some manufacturers are opting to invest in vehicle incentives to offset the impact of tariffs rather than advertising in Q1. Based on proactive and positive conversations with our partners, we are cautiously optimistic that Q2 represents a trough for OEM media and that we will begin to grow on a sequential basis in the latter half of the year. Moving on to cost. First quarter operating expenses were $163.6 million, down 5% year-over-year.
The decrease was primarily due to lower depreciation and amortization expense, specifically the amortization of customer lists associated with our 2017 spinoff, as well as more efficient marketing spend. Q1 adjusted operating expenses were $145.9 million, down 6% year-over-year from lower depreciation and amortization and strong cost controls across the organization. For the following line item detail, all comparisons are on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise noted. Product and technology expense increased $900,000 on a reported basis and decreased $300,000 on an adjusted basis. Higher severance costs and licensing and hardware expenses were the primary drivers of the reported increase. For adjusted expenses, lower compensation more than offset the aforementioned technology spend.
Marketing and sales decreased roughly $700,000 on both the reported and adjusted basis, benefiting from a more efficient marketing mix. General and Administrative expense was up nearly $1 million on a reported basis and up $2 million on an adjusted basis. The reported increase was primarily due to severance, compensation, and third-party costs, which were partially offset by the elimination of the D2C earn-out expense accrual. On an adjusted basis, compensation and third-party costs combined to push total adjusted G&A higher for the quarter. Several of these were discrete items that, while individually insignificant, aggregated into slightly elevated total expense. Over the medium to long term, we still expect to realize operating leverage in this line.
First quarter net income was $5 million or $0.08 per diluted share, compared to a net loss of $2 million or $0.03 per diluted share a year ago. Net income was primarily driven by lower depreciation and amortization. Adjusted Net Income for the first quarter was $26.7 million or $0.45 per diluted share, compared to $24 million or $0.37 per diluted share a year ago. Adjusted EBITDA of $51 million in the first quarter was up slightly year-over-year, while Adjusted EBITDA margin of 28.3% was consistent year-over-year and more than 1 percentage point above our guidance range. Onto the cash flow statement and balance sheet. Net cash provided by operating activities totaled $39.8 million for the quarter, compared to $29.5 million last year.
Free cash flow was $33.5 million for the quarter, up from $23.7 million a year ago, primarily due to favorable working capital changes from compensation accruals and the 2024 federal tax refund. In the first quarter, we bought back 2.5 million shares for $20 million, returning approximately 60% of in-period free cash flow to shareholders. Through April 30, 2026, we have bought back 3.8 million shares of common stock for $32.9 million. An efficient use of capital at current valuation levels that reduced shares outstanding by 5% since the beginning of the year. Driving shareholder value remains a priority and was reflected in our recent decision to increase our 2026 share repurchase target by 50% from $60 million- $90 million.
Based on year-to-date activity, we are pacing solidly towards this target and will continue to opportunistically leverage strong free cash flow conversion for capital returns and debt pay down. Debt outstanding was $455 million as of March 31st, 2026, for a total net leverage ratio of 1.8x . Total liquidity was $359.6 million as of March 31st, 2026, providing the capacity and flexibility to meet our capital allocation priorities. We'll conclude with outlook. Second quarter revenue growth is expected to be flat to up 2% year-over-year. Dealer revenue should continue to be a growth driver based on better value delivery and product upgrades and adoption. Based on year-to-date performance, we expect second quarter OEM and national revenue to face similar year-over-year pressures as Q1.
The episodic nature of advertising and media investments is also driving our slightly wider than usual quarterly guidance range to account for possible timing variances in customer spending. Second quarter Adjusted EBITDA margin is expected to be between 28% and 29%, and our priority is to grow adjusted EBITDA dollars year-over-year at a faster rate than revenue. Embedded within our guidance range is also a partial quarter of savings from the cost reduction program that was initiated in April. We are also reaffirming full year 2026 guidance of flat to 2% revenue growth and adjusted EBITDA margin of 29%-30%. With that, I'd like to open the line for Q&A.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. Our first question comes from the line of Tom White from D.A. Davidson. Your line is open.
Great. Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. One on AI, and then I have a follow-up. Toby, I was hoping maybe you could share your latest thoughts on, you know, how you feel about, you know, the prospect of consumers increasingly relying on the horizontal LLMs and increasingly maybe sort of personal agents to help, you know, them shop for cars. What does that mean for Cars.com's ability to kinda interface directly with consumers? Are there ways that you guys can maybe make your business more resilient or sort of better positioned for that sort of future? You know, maybe by making some of your data sort of more proprietary or protected or anything else. Thanks.
Hey, good morning. Thanks for your question. Yes, we do think that we are in a highly relevant space because car purchasing is very complex, and we have data accumulated over the past 20+ years. As we talked over during this call, we make that data more discoverable, which we're in the midst of that. We've made some great progress there. We have a great brand, which is also something that we see increasingly become more important, that people start initially at a high level searching, but then once they're getting down into deeper funnel metrics, they do rely on the branded context and the branded information that comes from Cars.com. Big picture, automotive is obviously a complex industry, and it requires deep vertical expertise.
A car is the second-largest purchase for consumers. Obviously the vast majority of consumers spend time researching in depth, actually on average, eight to nine hours. We have a great brand, and we are in the process of making it more discoverable and bringing it upfront to the site and the site experience. That will be a major focus for our future product development. That, let me just add, is also in the spirit of I talked about the interconnectivity. That's why it's so important to interconnect everything as opposed to driving in siloed subsidiaries. That's actually what we're doing underneath the platform and across different data silos. Thank you.
Great. Thanks. Maybe just a quick follow-up on Accu-Trade. Hoping maybe we just get a bit more color on kind of what's happening there. I think you mentioned subscribers down sequentially. You know, is there, you know, is there maybe any seasonality happening there?
Is what's happening with subscribers sort of a function of the automotive backdrop more generally, or is this so rt of more of a product market fit thing that you guys, you know, sort of plan to work through maybe via bundling it with kind of core marketplace. Just a little bit more color on what's happening at AccuTrade, and then I'll get back in the queue. Thanks.
Sure thing. Yeah, I wanna be very transparent. We're in the midst of rearranging and refocusing towards a more interconnected experience and more interconnected product. That means that we are de-emphasizing the standalone solution as opposed to really bundling it up and making this part of an integrated marketplace experience. We have a pretty exciting product roadmap. You'll hear more over the next couple of months and quarters. There's a lot in the making. That's why you see, you know, temporarily maybe the numbers going down a little bit because we're de-emphasizing again on just selling standalone solutions as opposed to making this an integrated part. I wouldn't call this like a trend in the industry or anything. It's more the result of what we're doing internally, and I would say it's according to plan. Thanks.
Thank you.
Our next question is from Rajat Gupta from JPMorgan. Yours line is open. Again, Rajat Gupta from JPMorgan, your line is open.
Sorry, I was on mute. Thanks for taking the questions. Could you quantify the MCP integration opportunity? How many Agentic AI platforms it's connected? What does that usage funnel look like in terms of lead quality for dealers? I have a quick follow-up. Thanks.
Right now it's just one, and we're working towards other opportunities and channel integrations, but that's just with the ChatGPT. Again, we also mentioned, the traffic is well below 1%.
Got it. You know, it looks like OEM and national is coming in weaker than expected, you know, both in 1Q, you know, including the 2Q guidance that Sonia had mentioned. It seems like you feel comfortable reiterating, you know, the margin guidance. Is it just the cost outs that are offsetting some of the drop-through from the OEM national weakness? I'm curious if any other color you could give. Also an update on the OEM and national full year guidance. I think the previous outlook was for flat year-over-year.
I think in terms of the margin guidance, certainly some of the actions that we took in April were helpful. In addition to that, we continue to be focused on driving efficiencies in the business. I think you heard Toby talk a little bit about shifts that we're making in terms of marketing and focusing on lead generation versus solely kind of these top of funnel metrics. At the end of the day, that's what dealers really value from us. Those are some of the levers we have at our disposal to deliver on margins. In addition to, over time, the interconnected nature of the platform will naturally lend itself to more efficiencies. Marketplace in and of itself is also a fairly high margin business.
Understood. Great. I'll jump back in queue. Thanks for all the color. Good luck.
Our next question is from Marvin Fong from BTIG. Your line is open.
Hi, great. Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. I guess I'd like to start, just to dive a little deeper into the solutions business. I think you did describe entering a new phase of growth there, and just any commentary on should we expect the count of solutions customers to continue to decline for a few more quarters here? I think last call we talked about how some dealers are striking out on their own, developing their own kind of solutions. Is that dynamic still at play here? Just some additional commentary would be great.
Yes, I do think we are entering a slightly different phase of growth. We've talked about it a little bit over the last several quarters, which is initially on websites in particular. As we got onto OEM programs, we had the opportunity for rapid market share gains, and the business is really switching to a mode where it's not just about unit count growth. It is, in fact, even more important to think about the packages that we're putting forward to dealers and how we integrate some of what we're doing from an innovation perspective and improvements and enhancements perspective into these packages. It becomes a little bit more basically of an ARPD game. I think we certainly would like to see that unit count number stay stable over a longer period of time with maybe some modest upward improvement.
We feel pretty good about some of the steps we've taken over the last several quarters, improvements we're making in site speed, enhancements that we think we're somewhat uniquely bringing to market on the security side of things to improve the technical performance of websites. Not to mention being able to integrate some of what we've done for marketplace with solutions. A good example of that. You know, how we can leverage Carson, the marketplace AI assistant, to enable experiences on DI websites in a more intuitive way. How we can take AI videos, which we launched as part of our IMV product, and bring that also over to the dealer website experience.
I think, you know, things don't always move as linearly as you would like them to, but we believe that we're making the right steps or taking the right steps to continue to grow websites.
Got it. Thank you, Sonia. Then my follow-up question, just on the repackaging, you know, I just wanted to more fully understand, like, how that's gonna roll out. You know, the last time there was a repackaging, a major repackaging, there was some dealer churn. Now, granted, I believe that was also an embedded price increase. Just how you're thinking about or how we should think about, you know, dealer counts, as you roll out the new set of packages. Do you expect there to be a period of some choppiness, or do you think you can just start growing the dealer base right out of the gate as you roll out these new packages? Thanks.
Yeah. I think in terms of what we saw on dealer count this quarter, the decline that we saw was largely related to solutions. As I sort of alluded to, we do believe we have a pretty robust plan on how to tackle that. The goal is to grow dealer count. It is critical to how we think about continuing to grow our marketplace business. Growing dealer count is one of those things that brings more inventory to us. It's one of the things that then brings more consumers to us, it's naturally just important to how we think about marketplace flywheel dynamics. I think critical to our ability to grow dealer counts is how we go to market with more interconnected solutions. There's a lot on the product roadmap that we're excited about.
Toby alluded to it earlier, which is, you know, the integration of Accu-Trade and Marketplace is something that puts really powerful data tools in the hands of dealers and allows them to manage one of their biggest assets more effectively, which is inventory.
Maybe let me just add what Sonia mentioned. You know, historically, this has been at the center of gravity for the company. By just looking at the market and in terms of what the different segments are and the customer penetration we have and dealership penetrations in those segments, we just feel there's a lot of room for us to grow. We need to tweak the product. We need to have the right product fit to really cater towards the needs of the dealers. It's not just a two or three d ifferent product type. It's more like, you know, there's six to eight different product types going forward. That's what we're working behind the scenes. To sum it all up, we do believe there's significant headroom for us to grow.
At the same time, we do not want to, you know, create the impression that all of a sudden, overnight, the number of dealers will jump through the roof. This is a concentrated effort that will take a couple quarters, but it's going to be product-led and product first and data first and AI first, and that's what we're working on.
Sounds good. Good luck to you both. Thank you.
The next question is from Gary Prestopino from Barrington Research. Your line is open.
Hi. Good morning, everyone. Two questions. One dealing with the cost savings, Sonia. You're saying you annualize the $25 million-$30 million for 2027. Is that an absolute number that we should expect to capture as we model? And where are those costs coming out of? Is it SG&A, cost of goods sold? Can you help us out there?
I think that is the $25 million-$30 million is kind of the discrete value on an annualized basis of the changes that we announced in April. It doesn't necessarily mean a $25 million-$30 million year-over-year step down.
Right.
If that's kind of your question. What it does enable us to do is be more thoughtful about reallocation in the business as we work to build out more of the interconnected nature, the market, the interconnections to marketplace.
Okay.
In terms of where the costs are coming out of, you know, they're distributed across the lines of our P&L. We took a hard look across the business, you know, whether it's operations, product and technology, marketing and sales, G&A. Those were all important areas for us to look at. How can we simplify our go-to-market process? How can we foster, you know, from a product and tech perspective, more of the interconnectivity? Tools have obviously improved also really materially over the last couple years that allows us to work more efficiently. Reducing layers in the organization is also really important as a way to speed decision-making. Those are some of the changes that we made.
Okay, that's helpful. Just a question, Toby, on as you're going out to market with an integrated sales product offering, you're gonna bundle it, right? I would assume that that will drive an increase in average revenue per dealer just from bundling. At the same time, does that preclude a salesperson from going into a dealership and also selling a single point solution? I guess, are they still gonna have the autonomy to sell a single point solution or you have to bundle in order to get, you know, the full bottle of wax from Cars.com?
It's a great question. You know, it's the trade-off, but by and large, we would say point solutions will be de-emphasized and not because they're not important, but just because you need to understand the holistic nature of a dealership infrastructure. There's many systems that are in process, and replacing one by one is a much harder sell, and it's much less convenient for dealers than coming in with the core, which is we are a marketplace partner. It's very easy to interact with us. It's very simple to get activities going, i.e., listings. It's very easy then to just activate or deactivate certain features that come as an embedded function with that marketplace integration. That's the way how we're thinking about it.
We wanna make it as easy as possible for the dealers to use different features dependent on what their needs are, as opposed to, "You gotta use this one solution only," and we are competing with two or three other legacy systems that are in place. That's our high-level strategy. In a nutshell, is it allowed to still sell point solutions? Will we still sell point solutions? Yes, if it makes sense and if there's a very specific need by a dealer. The broad stroke strategy will be we are leading with marketplace, and we'll provide an interconnected experience.
Okay. Thank you.
You're welcome.
Our next question is from Naved Khan from B. Riley Securities. Your line is open.
Great. Thanks a lot. Just a couple of questions from me. One, maybe just on the website business. You know, it saw a decline in dealer customers and I think last time around or Q4, I think you said it may be some maybe a passing trend or, you know, just more noise than anything else. Is there a change in the competitive dynamics or something else going on that's causing this sequential decline again in the website customer count? What are the things you can do to kind of correct it? The second question I had is just around the organic traffic, around 60% where it has been historically.
As more and more traffic goes to AI overviews, AI mode and things like that, what are the things that you can do on your end to stay in that organic result mix, that the technology pro, you know, that the top-of-the-funnel providers are kind of unleashing on everyone? Thank you.
Thanks, Naved. You know, I'll start with the website question. I do still think some of this is a little bit of noise. We are entering, and we've talked about it for the last two quarters, a slightly different phase of growth for websites. We initially grew through pretty significant market share gains as we got onto OEM programs and had the ability to bring in a significant number of dealers at a time. That dynamic has shifted a little bit since we're basically on program with everybody. The dealer acquisition side is coming in smaller pieces. It's still there in terms of a very active launch pipeline. What we're focused on more is not necessarily unit growth. It is how do we think about the packages that we're putting forward to market?
How do we think about more interconnectivity between marketplace and websites, specifically leveraging innovation happening in the marketplace side of our business and putting it onto dealer websites to make those tools available? Carson is a good example. Carson conversational search for dealer websites, bringing AI videos to dealer websites, not having it solely be a marketplace product. Those are some of the things that we're excited about. There is a real opportunity for us to continue to push website customers into higher tier packages since 50% of them are still in the base package. We feel good about this business. We have a solid foundation. Sometimes there are gonna be flips, when it comes to, you know, the trade-off of volume and ARP. I think it's largely noise at this point.
Yeah. Regarding your second question about the traffic, let's just put things in context. We love the discoverability with LLMs, but the traffic is well below 1%. We do know what people are searching for, and we do know that it's a really great tool and a really great entry point for very high-level searches. Again, we got the advantage. We are in a highly complex industry where it really matters on the purchasing intent and decision journey to go deep into the specificities of a particular vehicle, and that's where our strengths comes into play. You will see us being focused more on leads and the right leads and investments and reallocation towards generating those leads in the future than pure traffic.
I guess the punchline is, whereas in the past we were chasing traffic and visitors only as a key metric, we'll now focus more on the right leads. If you think this through as part of an interconnected marketplace experience, it means that we need to get the leads allocation and lead generation right because smaller dealers have completely different need for specific leads than larger dealerships, which are driven by the value they propose and the vehicles they carry. That's to summarize our opportunity also in context of AI.
Thank you.
Our next question is from Joseph Spak from UBS. Your line is open.
Thanks. Good morning, everyone. Sonia, I just wanna go back to some of the OpEx comments and maybe get a better understanding for the trends. I know, you know, you mentioned OpEx was down a lot year-over-year, but really it was D&A, right? Which I think was sort of a result of some of the actions in the fourth quarter. That's just sort of the lower trend. You still had, you know, like you know, G&A up year-over-year. Maybe back to the earlier questions, like how should we expect maybe some of the individual line items between, you know, product marketing, G&A to sort of really trend here over the balance of the year?
You're right to point out that a lot of what we saw on a year-over-year basis in operating costs was really tied to D&A. I think there are two pieces there. One is just some customer lists that were part of the spin. We fully amortized those, so that's kind of like a permanent step down. Then there's some of the reduction is also due to the accounting for our office leases. You won't see the benefit of the April actions in our Q1 numbers. That's gonna start trickling through and flowing through our numbers in Q2. The majority of the actions took place in April. Some of them are in May. Even in Q2, you don't see necessarily the full benefit of what we're doing.
It is reflected in the guidance numbers that we've put out both for Q2 and on a full year basis. With regards to G&A, you know, I do recognize it looks a little bit maybe wonky, the G&A trend for Q1. At the end of the day, we're talking about like pretty small, pretty small delta on a year-over-year basis. Most of this was tied to some like, again, two d ifferent discrete items, third-party costs, things like that had a blip. We would ultimately, on a longer term basis, expect to get leverage out of the G&A line. Transparently, we would expect to get leverage across our P&L. That's the goal in terms of driving expanded margins in the business.
Okay. Thank you for that. Second question is, I was going through the National Automobile Dealers Association annual book that, they put out every year over the weekend and, it mentioned that dealer advertising in 2025 was up like high single digits. Then they sort of break down where that's spent and third-party listings is 20%, so one of the larger buckets. It was actually down 1 point versus 2024. Overall grow, third-party listing share down a little bit. I'm not exactly sure, to be honest, how they're bucketing it and whether how I should sort of compare that to your business, whether it's sort of that display advertising and other line that is sort of most relevant.
Like you if it is, like you grew pretty nicely within that sub-revenue line in, I guess, what was, you know, implying there's sort of, I guess, decent share gain. I don't know if you could sort of just help me put into context, like how you think you're performing within some of those high level dealership spending, metrics and which line really, you know, should we be looking at?
This is Toby. Thanks for your question. Maybe just a more generic response to your question. We think we should do better, and we think that the market is attractive. We don't see any major headwinds from a dealership perspective or massive changes in behavior. We do see the opportunity for Cars.com to grow by having a better product fit and tailoring it towards the needs of the dealers. Again, going back to selling five different point solutions as opposed to, "Hey, here's what we can do. By the way, here's how we are combining those assets." Imagine, you know, the Dealer Inspire websites and the inventory that's listed on that and the subscription that we have on Cars.com. Imagine just that there was some sort of a connection, which by the way, in the past we didn't have. Those were siloed solutions.
From a dealer's perspective, you look at this from a budget and you're like, "Okay, I got a dealer website that cost me. I got listings there. I got my own listings. I got listings on third parties." I look at this entire bucket of expenses and you're like, "Oh, okay, great. Now I have a partner who can actually drive efficiency and bring synergies to the table." That's why we think we have headroom. We actually don't think that there's a major change. It's more in our hands to make this work and grow.
Thank you.
Our next question is from Doug Arthur from Huber Research Partners. Your line is open.
Yeah, thanks. Sonia, you might have covered this. I was sort of, you were throwing out a lot of numbers. Did website management grow in the quarter? I realize in the integrated strategy you've got, it might not be as relevant a number, but was that up year, quarter-over-quarter, number of desktops?
I think if you're asking about website units, we did see some volatility in that number, so they were down a little bit on a year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter basis.
Okay. Thank you.
There are no questions at this time. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.