Hello everyone. My name is Mayank Tandon, and I cover fintech at Needham. I'd like to welcome LendingTree to our conference. We have Scott Peyree, the CEO, and Andrew Wessel, Head of Investor Relations. Thank you for joining us.
Nice to be here. Thank you.
Terrific. So again, after the very sad and unfortunate passing of Doug, Scott, I wanted to just hear from you a little bit about how the transition has been in the CEO role. If you could talk a little bit about your background and how you've sort of assimilated into the position to head the company.
Yeah, okay. Yeah, just to give a quick background on myself, you know, I've been in the online performance marketing space since way back in 2000 is when I got into the industry. I first started a company called World Class Strategy that I sold in 2006, and I started QuoteWizard in 2006. And I built that business over 12 years and sold it to LendingTree in 2018 after it had become a pretty significant player in the shop and compare space for insurance products. So LendingTree was bought in 2018. I then ran the insurance division, quote unquote, of LendingTree for a number of years until a little over two years ago, I had the opportunity and became the President and Chief Operating Officer of LendingTree.
So I performed in that role for a couple of years, you know, really expanding, getting to know all the lending products and the lending industries we were in and running the operations and the core business operations of that business. And then, yep, unfortunately, tragic circumstances, Doug, the founder of LendingTree, passed away unexpectedly back, it was the end of October. You know, so I was suddenly thrown into the CEO role, but I was also in a pretty good position where I had been running the vast majority of the business for some time. And it actually ended up being a pretty good transition because it was in the succession plan that I would be the one to step up and take over in a circumstance, the tragic circumstance that happened, or if he had moved on, it'd just be chairman of the Board or something.
We were kind of preparing for that. So it happened a little quicker than we expected it to happen, but it's been good since, and things have been running well.
Great. Well, maybe Scott, I think it might be a good time to step back and talk about the LendingTree portfolio. You have a lot going on under the umbrella. So if you could maybe just spend a few minutes talking about the different businesses, and then we can dive into some of the drivers and the numbers behind those businesses. But maybe just at a very high level, what does LendingTree do? Where does it play, and what are the key market segments it actually operates in?
Yeah, I mean, and I will say, you know, shortly after I took over, I put together a new North Star of the company, which is we want to be the number one destination to shop financial products. And so that's the basis of where we're at. And where we are as a company, I do feel like we are more diversified than all of our direct competitors right now, or many of our direct competitors are really focused on one or two industries where they're in, where we've got a number of insurance and financial products we have. So just a quick overview on the insurance side, we have auto insurance, home insurance, and health insurance, our main product categories there, all pretty decent size. Auto insurance, obviously the biggest one. On the lending side, we've got mortgage products, which consist mainly of purchase, refinance, and home equity products.
And then we've got a consumer lending category that consists of personal loans, small and medium sized business lending, credit cards, deposits, and auto loans. So offering a lot of, you know, and that's, you know, as we look to the future, we might and probably will add more products and service offerings to the consumers, but we feel like we're in a pretty good spot right now where we have a pretty broad set of lending and insurance products we're offering to the consumers.
Got it. So given your background from the insurance side with the QuoteWizard business, and we were just talking to EverQuote just a while ago, which is one of your main competitors, if you could just maybe step back and talk about the insurance market landscape, how healthy is the market? I think 2025 was actually a very good year coming off some really difficult years in the past. What does it look like for 2026 and beyond?
Yeah, the insurance marketplace, it's been a pretty wild ride after COVID. You know, the, you know, when inflation really went out of control after COVID, the insurance carriers were really not prepared for that at all. And at a macro level, the whole industry became very unprofitable, and it hit some dark times for a few years. They really got out of that end of 2023, beginning of 2024, and it's been a pretty strong growth cycle since then. You know, 2025, we had record revenue and record VMD in all three insurance categories: auto, home, health insurance. 2026, my suspicion is we will again have record revenue and VMD in all three categories. So the bull market in insurance, in insurance marketing specifically, continues. Carriers in general are very profitable and don't really see any warning signs of becoming unprofitable or less profitable anytime in the near future.
You know, I think we're in the final phase of insurance carriers expanding all of the markets and geographies that they're willing to offer insurance in. We had a number of carriers even in the first quarter this year that have opened up states that they have historically not written insurance in, even before COVID, states they didn't write insurance in. So that just shows how healthy the market is. I think you get into late 2026, early 2027, that's when you start seeing the rate competitions kick up, when carriers actually start reducing rates as a necessity to keep growing market share, which that will just continue the shopping behavior for a year or two to be on that. So I think we're in a very good part of the cycle, kind of right in the middle of the cycle right now, of the growth cycle.
Would you say the insurance segment is being driven by a few clients that are really aggressively marketing, or is it much more broad based? And on that note, we've been hearing California is still a little bit behind the other states in terms of, you know, the price adjustments. If you could comment on that as well.
Yeah, I mean, I would say California is one of those states, for example, that we've had some openings just this year. California has been a very hard state historically to write insurance in for carriers, just based off of state regulations. It's very hard for private companies to make profit there. But in a funny and interesting way, with the inflation in the insurance markets in places like California and New York, for that example, similar, the insurance market's kind of falling apart and it forced these regulators to start working with the insurance carriers of like, what do we need to do to make this work? We need to have a consumer insurance marketplace in our states.
And so, like a lot of those, it took a lot of negotiation, a long time, but now we're getting to a point where they're ready to start actively advertising in these states, you know, not just writing policies for consumers coming to them, but willing to pay companies like LendingTree to acquire consumers from those states.
And then going back to my earlier question about the breadth of the growth in insurance, is it being dictated by a few clients or is it very broad based?
Oh, yeah, I would say it's being. There's always the top brands. You know, you look at the top brands nationwide, you know, that are, you know, Progressive, Allstate, State Farm, Liberty Mutual. I mean, it's the same cast of characters that you'll see doing a lot of TV brand advertising. We'll be doing a lot of the online, you know, performance marketing advertising as well. So I mean, I always say it's fair to look at just the market share of the top 10 or 20 carriers that, give or take some nuance. That generally is how the advertising dollars roll out.
Then digging a little bit deeper in the insurance segment, how much of the growth is coming from carriers versus the agents? Where's the bigger opportunity in your mind going forward?
Well, you know, as far as a pure top line dollar perspective, they're all growing, which is good. You know, our local agents, you know, it was a record, by far a big record year last year. Now the total dollars coming direct from the carriers just because their advertising budgets are so massive. So when you look at a total dollar perspective, it would be the direct-to-consumer carriers is where the vast majority of the revenue growth is coming from. But our products that we sell, like the lead product and call product we sell to local agents, is a more profitable product for us, right? The agents will pay a premium to get more targeted leads and calls in the geographies where they operate. So it's a symbiotic relationship.
When the big direct-to-consumer carriers have a lot of advertising budget, that lets us control a lot more consumers coming to our site. And when all those consumers come to our site, then we have local agents and whatnot are buying those premium products that we make more margin off of.
Got it. And then we'll move on to the other segments as well, but insurance being one of the key engines behind growth, let's focus a little bit more on that. As you think about the market opportunity, you know, where do you see your penetration today? How big is the TAM in your mind? And then are there other areas within P&C that you might want to go into to expand that market opportunity over time?
Yeah, I mean, I'll start with the TAM. I mean, you look at, and if you really want to look at the TAM in the insurance world and the P&C world, health insurance for that matter too, what you really got to look at is the total dollars being spent between performance marketing, brand advertising, and commissions. Because commissions is a marketing dollar for these carriers. And so you look at that, it's about $150 billion a year the carriers are spending right now. The online performance marketing segment that the likes of us and EverQuote, you know, and others are part of, we've had a big growing pie there. It's probably a little over $10 billion now, but compared to $150 billion, there's a lot of growth for that pie to grow for us.
I would say in general, what we hear from our clients, our competitive group in general is some of the most effective advertising dollars they put out there. I always joke like it's the brand. They spend money with Disney to get the suite at the Super Bowl. They spend money with us to get a bonus check at the end of the year because we actually bring the bonuses.
Is there a number around like your penetration today and how big do you think insurance can get over time?
It's difficult to honestly put a big number, but I mean, I feel like it is, as you can see with our numbers, it has grown very significantly over the past two years. I don't see any reason why it's not going to grow significantly this year. When we look out there, we feel like there's a lot of opportunities, not just from the carriers spending dollars with us, but from different places we can go to acquire consumers that we aren't as active in right now, that we could be more active in, and we're investing internally to be more active in. So, you know, outside of a big macro industry downturn, I think this is going to be a double-digit industry grower for the indefinite future.
Right. Got it. All right. We'll come back to insurance maybe later, but I wanted to also then talk about the home side, which is sort of the business that LendingTree used to be known for, and obviously with mortgage rates now coming down, maybe there's a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel, but if you could just talk about the home business, the dependency on interest rates or mortgage rates rather, and then the HELOC business has done well, but we're waiting for that refi and purchase business to inflect. So sort of where are we in that cycle with the home business?
Yeah, so the home business is very, very dependent on interest rates, much more so than all of our other lending businesses that are less dependent on interest rates. But yeah, the purchase and refi space is at trough levels right now, and that's largely based off of where interest rates are at. The HELOC home equity space, it grew a decent amount for us last year. It's been a good business. A lot of our clients that were really focused on, say, refinance, you know, back in the heydays of refinance have converted their sales teams to be more focused on home equity. And so it's a good spot where they can keep that sales force ready to go. But I think everyone in the industry, they want the refinance product to come back because the refinance is just, it's way more valuable. It's way more profitable.
You know, a $30,000, $50,000 home equity loan is just not worth as much as a $500,000 cash out refinance, right? So we're all, you know, we feel you get interest rates down to like the 5.5% range, you start really building that snowball where the, you know, in the money consumers, as far as people that can, the equation really works to do a cash out refinance. It starts to build at that point. If you were able to get down to 5%, like then it's really starting the hockey stick, I think. Now, time will tell, right? It's hard to predict when exactly that all happens. I mean, I'm happy that the Trump administration has made interest rates and housing affordability a focal point.
So, you know, fingers crossed we'll have some support from the federal government to accelerate getting interest rates to where they need to be to open that up. But yeah, if you look back to the 2018, 2019, it was refinance was a very big business for LendingTree. And it will be a very big business again when it comes back.
Do you care between purchase and refi? Does it matter from an economic value to the company, like what's moving the needle, or does it not, you know, matter how the business inflects?
Refinance moves, yes, I would say we do care, and mainly because, I mean, we'll offer the products to anyone, but purchase is a longer term product for the consumer, right? They're shopping for a house. They got to work with the real estate agent. They got to find the house. So people that buy, purchase leads and consumers from us, you know, it can be a three or four month cycle before they're actually making the sale. So because of that, the sale can be harder to make. Where a refinance product, it's usually within a week or two, you know, if you've been able to offer something to the consumer, and it's an easier transaction for the consumer too. It's just a math equation of like, all right, I get $50,000 in my bank account. My monthly payment's going to go down by $50.
Yeah, let's do it, right? So it's an easier, you know, commitment to purchase versus thinking about like, do I really want to buy this new home? So yeah, we operate in all the above, but refinance is generally a much bigger product for us than purchases.
Scott, given where we're at right now, and hopefully the market will get healthier on the home side, but can you still grow double digits in this type of environment, or do rates have to come down to like 5%, as you said, or maybe below five and a half to really be able to see that inflection on the business?
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, our home business grew, what, by about 20% last year?
Yeah, almost 30% in HELOC.
And so that was pretty good growth. But what I would say, I would call that operational excellence versus macro tailwinds. You know, there was not 20% growth in people purchasing homes. And so I think, so to answer your question of these levels, I do think we can get 10%-20% growth just from operational excellence. And because even in a trough level dormant environment, there's lots of people looking for home equity loans. There are still millions of people purchasing homes that even at these trough levels. So it's just a matter of being good at getting in front of them. Now, the interest rate level, that's not about growing 20%. That's about growing 2%, 3%, 400%, 1,000%. That's when that snowball starts.
That's the pent-up demand that we're sitting on, and like every year that goes by that the housing market stays dormant, it's going to be a dam that breaks at some point that I think will be a little bit of a tidal wave that comes through the system.
Yeah. Any change in the competitive landscape versus where you were in the past? Because looking back, I think LendingTree was the sort of go-to place for refi and purchase. Has there been a change in the competitive landscape over the last, you know, four or five years, you would say?
Yeah, I would say, you know, when you get to these, you know, these trough levels in the industry, you know, as it reaches really low levels, there was a bit of a shakeout in the industry. Some competitors, you know, got out of the business altogether or their businesses failed because, you know, mortgage was the only thing they had going for them, and then it kind of died off. A number of our competitors are still around, but I would say our positioning as LendingTree, we are in the mortgage products, even though it's a lot smaller than insurance right now, in mortgage, we are the clear number one provider to the industry. All of the big clients in that industry would agree with that statement that there's LendingTree and then there's a pretty big drop off to the next set of competitors.
So, you know, it's funny, even though it's at low levels, our market positioning in mortgage is probably better than any industry we're in.
I would agree with that. Let's turn to the consumer side. Again, you have a lot going on there. So maybe if you could just kind of delve into what the consumer side includes, because I think some of the areas would be levered to, you know, different aspects of the financial services market. So maybe.
So our consumer side consists of small, medium-sized business lending, personal loans, credit cards, deposits, and auto loans. Small business, like it's categorized as a consumer that doesn't as a business. Maybe at some point we'll change that. But so of all those categories, personal loans and small business loans are way larger than the other three categories we're in. Even though the, you know, auto loans, I think is a category we're excited about. We think can grow quite a bit over the next few years. But small business has been within the consumer category by far our biggest grower. That's been a very successful business for us. We actually do direct sales in that business. So we have a brokerage where the lenders work with us, and we're working directly with the consumers to write the loans. Because of that, that's one of our best consumer experience categories.
Like the surveys and whatnot, our merchants rate us very high when they write loans for us compared to when we send leads out to other brokers that sell small business loans. It's got a great recurring revenue model because merchants will very consistently come back and get a new loan after they pay off their previous loan. A typical loan in the small business world is only about six to nine months, so they're typically shorter term loans, so there's constantly the turn of writing new loans in that world. The personal loan space, that grew a decent amount for us last year. It has, you know, the personal loan space shrunk up a number as interest rates went up, and a lot of the actual lenders themselves were kind of concerned about default rates going up. They tightened their credit boxes because of it.
So just the percentage of consumers shopping for a loan on our site that actually get loan offers is smaller today than it was four years ago. The good news is the loan portfolios, as a general statement, have performed very well for the personal loan lenders. So, you know, there was that concern and they tightened up, but that whole hockey stick of default rates that everyone was worried about never really materialized. So, you know, our real hopes there is that we start seeing credit boxes open up a lot more as a lot of the investors that are funding these personal loan lenders are more comfortable taking on more credit risk with the consumers. That would be the biggest driver of growing our revenue dramatically is just if a higher percentage of the consumers shopping for loans, we're getting loan offers. Any other questions on the?
No, I was just saying the business, is it contingent on rates coming down further to sort of drive that acceleration, or is it something that you're doing from your standpoint that can accelerate?
Personal loans isn't really contingent upon rates. It's not as rate sensitive because you think the number one use case for a personal loan is debt consolidation. So you got a credit, you know, if someone has a credit card at 25%, they're carrying a balance at 25% APR. You know, whether a personal loan is 8, 10, or 12% is still a dramatic savings over what they're paying the credit card company. So it's not really as interest rate. So it's more about the credit boxes where there's a lot of those consumers that have that credit card debt that the personal loan companies aren't willing to offer a loan to because of their credit profile.
So, like, if that starts expanding, just if our clients start saying, like, okay, we're willing to write more loans to more people, we have over a million consumers a month that come through and do a full quote request on our personal loans funnel. It is our number one product just as far as quantity of consumers on the lending side of the house. So yeah, if we see investors in the personal loan clients getting more comfortable taking on more credit risk, it's more about that than it is about interest rates going down. Now, interest rates going down help because it's a bigger spread that the personal loan companies now make. So that helps them take more risk.
This talk about putting a cap on credit card rates, I mean, does that have any potential implications for your business or is it, again, maybe too early to tell?
Yeah, I mean, it's pretty early and it's hard to gauge whether that's anything that would ever really happen versus, you know, Trump just making populist statements. I mean, it would be good for our business because our credit card business is actually pretty small. But if they cap that on rates, credit card issuers would, I mean, they would be going out of business. They would stop issuing cards to anybody. And so that would drive a lot more consumers to personal loans, which is a pretty big business for us. So that would actually be a little bit of a boon for us where more consumers would be shopping for personal loans because they just wouldn't be able to get credit cards. But I just don't know if that's a reality of capping rates at 10%.
Scott, so putting all the pieces together, even just given some of your comments on the consumer side, is it fair to say that you can maybe sustain that double-digit growth that you exited 3Q with? Because that was, I think, the inflection where we saw all the businesses do well. Is that something that's sustainable given the current environment?
Short answer, yes. I'm highly confident we're going to be able to sustain those growth levels throughout 2026. I feel like we have a number of investment initiatives that we're building this year that will more likely impact 2027 than 2026. So yeah, that's to me, as I run the business, it's just like I always start, you know, how do we get these growth targets we've achieved for this year, which are double-digit growth targets, but then also what are we building to make sure we have double-digit growth targets for the following year? And I would say the items we're focusing on as a company, I've got very high, you know, I don't think they're high risk. There's a lot of like, if you just do the work, you know, the traffic will come, the VMD will come.
Great, and I'd be remiss if I don't ask you about AI, so I'd love to hear what LendingTree is doing on the AI front across all the three different business segments.
Yeah, you know, there's a number of lanes with AI and we're trying to fish in as many ponds as possible. I mean, there's probably currently the most effective use cases of AI for us over the past year have just been in our marketing technology, in our marketing, and I think in general, that was one of the early day use cases that were very effective for AI. We have found a ton of benefit. Like how we do some of our marketing today is dramatically different than it even was a year ago, and it's really cool, some of the tools the big companies like Meta and Google have made that we're using, but also some of the tools that just like new small software companies.
We're always. We have this attitude of like, hey, if anyone has a good use case AI idea on the marketing front, we'll go out there and test it. We want to be leaders in that space. We have the quantity of consumers and advertising dollars that go out that we can really determine whether something works effectively or not. So that's lane one. Lane two is just corporate operational efficiency that I think every company is focusing on. We're having some wins there. It's not sexy stuff, but it's just a matter of being able to do more work with the same amount of people. This is kind of the goal at the end of the day there. Lane three, which I'm really excited about for the next few years, is using AI tools, whether that's voice AI, whether that's agentic AI, whether that's LLM style forms.
But the goal is to make the shopping experience better and easier for the consumers. Like every industry we're in, these are complicated financial products. You oftentimes need to talk directly to salespeople. So you're getting offers from multiple salespeople. You don't really, like how are you comparing the offers to make sure you're comparing apples to apples? Do you know if you're negotiating properly? Are you asking the right questions to make sure you're getting the product that you need? You know, if you want, would you like to have an agentic voice AI answering the calls and texts on your behalf so you don't have to, you know, all of these, I think we have a consumer experience team that's just focused on building all of these different things to try to constantly incrementally improve the shopping experience.
I think over the next two to three years, there's going to be some fundamental changes in the shopping experience. I think it's going to be easier to shop for these products. It's going to be, the consumer is going to know that they're getting the best product that's available to them. That in turn will increase more and more shopping behavior as people get more comfortable shopping and feeling like they're getting the proper support. We're excited to be a leader in that. The fourth line I would say is just working directly with the LLMs. It's like how do we use our unique data, our unique tools and widgets and embed, you know, whether it's a Gemini or ChatGPT or whoever, like embed it while the consumers are on those platforms.
Where do we see the tangible benefits from these investments? Will it be in VMM? Will it be more on the EBITDA line? Will it be better growth? How do you see that playing out on the P&L?
I think you, so I think there's two major categories. You have your short-term tangible, you'll increase profitability dramatically by getting higher consumer engagement. Like if consumers are shopping for a product and it's complicated, they don't understand, they're getting overwhelmed by getting too many phone calls or emails, they'll disengage from the shopping process. They'll be like, no, forget it. I don't want to do it. So if you make it easier, more fluent, the engagement will stay there for the consumer and that will turn into more closed loans, more closed insurance policies. That turns into more revenue and profit for us. Longer term, even a bigger impact, I think, is as we improve that shopping experience, now the consumers will be coming back more. Like, okay, I went, I was shopping for home equity. It was a pretty good experience.
So now I'm going to go back and shop for other financial products. And so I think we'll get, it will help drive more overall shopping behavior for all sorts of products when people are like, oh, this wasn't so hard to get this. So now I'm going to try to get this product or that product through LendingTree.
Got it. And then speaking of profitability, given the double-digit growth expectations for all the businesses, how do you see EBITDA profitability? Or maybe you could talk about both VMM and EBITDA profitability trending over time.
Yeah, I mean, I am always, and as I tell everyone, Doug was the same way as me. Like I'm a total VMD person versus VMM. So like for me, revenue is a necessary evil to generate VMD. And so like, but actually it's called evil. I mean, revenue is very important. It's very important. But like if revenue is going up 50% or going up 10%, you know, or going down 10%, you know, it's more of like how are we, how is VMD constantly going up? So like you've seen our VMM go down the past couple of years, mainly because the insurance market has gotten so hot and these advertising dollars have gone out there and it's just like the revenue has gone through the roof, which is great. But our biggest concern is that the VMD has kept going up.
So as that stabilizes, you'll see our VMD percentage start to go up. But you know, internally we really look at EBITDA as a percentage of VMD, more so than EBITDA as a percentage of revenue. Because I think one example I gave is like if we're going to spend $50 million a month with Google or $20 million a month with Google, that doesn't really change your OpEx equation. It's the same technology, it's the same people. It's like, you know, your OpEx generally stays the same. So it's more of EBITDA as a percentage of VMD, I think is the important metric for our type of business to look at.
Got it.
And that has been going up, by the way. I don't know if you have any specifics on.
Yeah, no, I think that's been going up, you know, by either, you know, 200, 400 basis points a year. So we are driving operating leverage. It's showing up in the EBITDA line. Obviously, EBITDA is growing faster than VMD. And the other thing is, you know, I think there's a commitment that we want to continue to invest in the business, but at the same time, generate operating leverage off of those investments. So we want EBITDA to be growing, you know, or VMD to be growing at least twice as fast as OpEx. So that operating leverage always drops down into EBITDA and reward shareholders.
Excellent. And then maybe just to sum up, could we talk about the capital structure? You know, obviously there's leverage and I think, Andrew, you mentioned that the credit agencies upgraded your rating. So maybe if you could comment on that and what is sort of the optimum leverage ratio that you'd like to run at over time?
Yeah, so yeah, we got an upgrade from Moody's yesterday to B2. We have $400 million of debt that we raised in August that refinanced all of our debt. That Moody's upgrade actually will reduce our cost of debt by 25 basis points. So we're happy about that, and then we've got, you know, somewhere in the range of $70 million-$80 million of cash against that $400 million. So our net debt's, you know, more like $330 million or below. Ultimately, we kind of, with Scott and the Board, really discussed, you know, how do we prepare for worst-case scenarios? 2023, we generated about $80 million of EBITDA, and if you remember, every single one of our businesses was in the ditch in 2023 due to rates, inflation, all that.
So, using that as a trough, we want to make sure that even if that were to reoccur, that we wouldn't exceed, you know, kind of two and a half times leverage on that number. So, if you do 2.5x $80 million, that would get you up to about $200 million of net debt. So, for $330 million today, we'd love to get down to about $200 million, at which point we think that's a very, very protective and conservative capital structure for our business. And then, you know, at that point, kind of you open up the opportunity for buybacks, M&A, all the other capital allocation routes. But right now, I think, you know, Scott and the whole board are on board with reducing our quantum of debt to improve our free cash flow conversion from EBITDA.
Because historically, that's been 70%-80% and we'd like to get back there.
Yep. And yeah, I'd just echo that we're very aligned. Myself, the board, Jason, the CFO, we're all very aligned that right now, and the good news is our business kicks off a lot of cash. So we can keep aggressively paying down those loans until we get into a very good leverage situation there. I am, at that point, I am excited about other uses of capital allocation. You know, whether it's, you know, doing some industry consolidation, which I think will inevitably happen in the next few years. I think we can be a leader in that consolidation. You know, more heavy investing into new industries and new products for the consumers. Yeah, it's, yeah. So we're going to be the latter half of this year, we're going to start reinvesting in our brand, you know, rebuilding and repositioning the brand.
I think we have a very good historical brand, but it's too much based off of our unaided awareness, isn't where it needs to be, and then when people think of LendingTree, they think too much just solely as a mortgage company, right, so we're going to really be working on spending some brand dollars to reposition that and really be top of mind with consumers, you know, that LendingTree is just a destination for all sorts of financial products.
Great. With that, let me open the floor for any questions from the audience.
Just comment on how customer acquisition may change through transition from search to agent-driven or how you see that LLM-driven.
Yeah, I mean, I would say you're looking, you know, the LLMs, the traffic we get from LLMs is still, it's fair to say a tiny, tiny percentage of what we get from other sources of like a Google search or Meta, you know, social display, all that stuff. Now, Google's been interesting where they've been integrating their AI results more and more. So you're seeing the usage, the usage of people staying on Google, doing more searches on Google's platform is increasing, right? Like their search, you know, their quantity of searches is increasing because, you know, with AI overviews and so a lot of questions are being answered. But then when they do, but then what's nice actually about that for us is when they do finally click and they're ready to shop, the intent's a lot higher when they come.
Now you go to somewhere like ChatGPT. It's just, you know, the use cases of ChatGPT are, you know, from a consumer's perspective, haven't really been heavy in like shopping for financial products and whatnot. So we're seeing some traffic there. It is very, the traffic we get that's referred to us is very high intent for the similar reasons as they've typically done a lot more research before they end up on it, that they're ready to buy. Like when they come to our site, like I would love and I hope to see, you know, the traffic continuing to grow with some of these other categories because for me, I like to diversify where I'm spending money as much as possible.
So as traffic continues to grow there, I think sooner or later we're going to see sponsored listings in a number of these new players that we haven't yet. So we'll obviously be first movers when that happens and we're excited about that happening over time. Yeah, does that answer your question?
Great. I think that's all the time we have. Appreciate Scott, Andrew. Thank you for coming to our conference.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, thanks for having us.
All right.