Cars.com Inc. Common Stock

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the CARS third quarter 2025 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, November 6, 2025. I would now like to turn the conference over

to Catherine Chen. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for the Cars.com Inc. Third Quarter 2025 Conference Call. With me this morning are Alex Sutter, CEO, and Sonia Jain, CFO. Alex will start by discussing the business highlights from our third quarter. Then 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 Alex, I'd like to draw your attention to our forward-looking statements and the description and the definition of non-GAAP financial measures, which can be found in our presentation. We'll be discussing certain non-GAAP financial measures today, including adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margins, adjusted operating expenses, adjusted net 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 Alex.

Thank you, Catherine. We were pleased to achieve record revenue and drive strong customer and product momentum in the third quarter on our path to re-accelerating growth. Revenue of $182 million reflected continued contribution from websites, trade and appraisal solutions, and marketplace. These account increased for the third consecutive quarter as we reached a new three-year high, with Marketplace in particular outperforming expectations. Top-line strength, combined with our strong operating model, enabled investments for innovation while also producing adjusted EBITDA margin of 30%, up over 160 basis points year-over-year. And resulting cash generation supported another $19 million of share buybacks in Q3 for a total of $64 million year-to-date. It's clear that our consistent execution is delivering compounding benefits, and we feel confident there is more improvement to come. Our strong focus on 2025 growth initiatives continue to deliver measurable progress for the business in the third quarter. First, sales velocity and driving unit volume has lifted marketplace and solutions performance. Under new sales leadership and enhanced go-to-market strategy, we added 270-plus dealers year-over-year, with subscriptions up across all our leading products. In total, we powered 19,526 dealers in Q3, our largest customer base since late 2022 and only a few hundred dealers away from an all-time record. New franchise dealer sign-ups also increased appreciably quarter over quarter in Q3, complementing the share gain amongst independent dealers that we achieved in the first half of the year. Dealers consistently cite our unique consumer audience, data insights, and differentiated product suite as key factors that are motivating them to join our platform. Second, our phased marketplace repackaging exercise, intended to align pricing with product value and enhance platform benefits for dealers, launched in early summer. By bundling media products and features in new Premium and Premium Plus packages, we are helping dealers drive up to 14% more leads per listing versus base packages. And we anticipate adoption of Premium Plus to accelerate with growing dealer awareness of these benefits. Finally, our product team remains at the forefront of helping consumers, OEMs, and dealers navigate the changing auto retail landscape. We are putting AI-powered search and recommendations in the hands of marketplace shoppers and simultaneously enhancing lead conversion for dealers through advanced analytics. Through our appraisal and wholesale capabilities, we are also directly helping dealers address used car scarcity and specifically how to profitably source attractive late model inventory. And we continue to be the only platform with integrated B2B wholesale and B2C retail capabilities, a key value proposition as dealers look for innovation and operating leverage. Our multifaceted AI-first platform makes us essential for both consumer and dealer customers. We are seeing clear signals of traction in our platform strategy. Starting with Marketplace, we fired on all cylinders in Q3 with momentum carrying into October. We drew 25.4 million average monthly visitors, up 4% year over year, leveraging better optimization of our visitor acquisition strategy to attract strong consumer demand. Traffic year to date was 488 million visits to the end of Q3, setting a new record. Our leading editorial and brand expertise is evident from third-party data that shows that we're the most cited public automotive marketplace across AI tools like Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT with double the citations of our closest peer. And we continue to leverage our strong brand and steady stream of in-demand content as an integral part of our product and marketing strategy in this evolving landscape. AI is central to our product innovation roadmap as we enhance the quality of our marketplace to deliver a best-in-class personalized shopping experience for car buyers. Carson, our newly launched natural language search assistant, gives users an interactive experience more akin to a conversation you have with an AI agent to complement traditional search results. Carson currently assists 15% of searches and search refinement on web and mobile today. Compared to the average shopper, AI users also save three times more vehicles to revisit later, a sure sign that we're fueling deeper consumer engagement. Just like we were a pioneer with AI integration on the cars.com website, our next milestone will be integrating Carson into our number one most downloaded automotive marketplace app. Mobile apps are our highest converting channels, and we believe AI-powered targeted search results may lift conversion even further as we drive search efficacy and our marketplace flywheel. For dealers who subscribe to our marketplace, we continue to deliver high-performing tools for their sales and marketing teams, embedding into their tech stack to drive engagement, conversion, and ultimately sales. Shopper alerts, which we launched in the third quarter to fast follow our new lead intelligence reports, proactively flag shopper engagement and buying indicators to dealers. Over 50% of Marketplace customers have already used this feature at least once in its first two months of launch. And as you can see from customer feedback, shopper alerts are quickly becoming a key part of dealership workflow, helping salespeople identify the best prospects to close more sales. With such an enthusiastic response, we're quickly iterating to provide richer data and AI-driven insights directly into dealer CRMs, both with incumbent players and through new investments in disruptive technologies as we unlock the full potential of our platform with more AI and SaaS-based solutions. Turning to our trading and sourcing solutions, AccuTrade and Dealer Club continue to scale in Q3 as dealers increasingly gravitate to tech-first products that advance the industry's long-term goal of improving profitability. The recent success of digital dealers who rely heavily on acquiring vehicles directly from consumers has put an even finer point on the importance of a diversified vehicle acquisition strategy for driving up GPUs. Accutrade and Dealer Club addressed this gap by allowing dealers to acquire from either Service Lane or other trusted dealers backed by the most accurate vehicle values in the industry. Accutrade grew to 1,150 subscribers in Q3, and Dealer Club increased its active users by nearly 40% quarter over quarter. We're also pleased to share that Accutrade surpassed 1 million quarterly appraisals, a milestone that points to enthusiastic and growing customer engagement. Importantly, over 50% of vehicles acquired via Accutrade are between 1 and 5 years old, highlighting the attractive pool of in-demand late-model inventory that dealers access when they expand beyond traditional physical auctions. New this quarter, dealers can now easily analyze their Accutrade activity via profit funnel and trade capture reports, seeing how much profit is made on Accutrade versus non-Accutrade cars and conversion rates on appraisals. We're excited to see these products and features further scale as we continue to innovate. Lastly, total subscribers for Dealer Inspire and D2C Media websites reached nearly 7,900 in Q3. We have grown website subscriptions for five straight years, an impressive feat that speaks to our differentiated technical capabilities and support model. Similar to Marketplace, website customers are also benefiting from our AI leadership. Our dealer websites also support discovery and data processing by popular AI search tools, and we are now proactively enabling customers to improve their own site visibility. By building more consultative relationships and innovating on behalf of customers, we're confident we can further expand our market share. Across marketplace, websites, and appraisal and wholesale, we delivered triple-digit dealer count growth for the second straight quarter. We also achieved ARPD growth on a sequential basis, consistent with our expectations that repackaging and cross-selling would lift performance beginning in Q3. We're on pace to surpass all-time records for both direct dealer customers and ARPD before the end of 2026, on our way towards greater targets as we expand and enhance our product offering. While dealer revenue was at its healthiest level in several quarters, we did see some variability in OEM and national revenue, which was down 5% year-over-year in Q3. Specifically, two OEM partners significantly adjusted their media investments during the fall due to factors like internal agency changes that are unrelated to our performance or value. I'll also note that both of these customers remain advertisers on our platform and were in active talks to win a greater share of their forward spending. As we discussed in prior calls, our OEM revenue pipeline is strong. Planning discussions for 2026 have been positive, and our unique ability to drive better Tier 1 to Tier 3 outcomes via our marketplace is a winning asset for automakers as they compete for consumer demand. We're confident that this segment can resume its growth trajectory in the coming quarters and continue to be a strong contributor to revenue and margin expansion. Looking at this quarter as a whole, I'm pleased that our steady execution is showing up in the P&L and in positive trends that point to more gains ahead. We're driving our business forward, growing revenue and gaining customer market share, all while continuously innovating. Q3 is the right step in the right direction, and we're focused on finishing the year with a healthy exit rate so that we can deliver even better results as we continue scaling our leading platform. And now I'll turn the call over to Sonia to discuss our third quarter financial results. Sonia?

Thank you, Alex.

We delivered a strong third quarter across multiple key financial metrics, producing record revenue, adjusted EBITDA expansion, and robust cash generation. Consistent execution of 2025 growth initiatives has been our top priority, and our new revenue trajectory reflects the positive changes we've implemented year to date. We're also confident that as these improvements compound in our subscription business, both revenue and margins will accelerate in the coming quarters. Starting with our revenue discussion, third quarter revenue was $181.6 million, up 1% year-over-year and in line with our expectation for low single-digit growth in the second half of the year. Dealer revenue was up 2% year-over-year, driven by favorability from retackaging activities and better customer count. Our ongoing repackaging work resulted in successful renegotiation of additional OEM website agreements and the phase launch of new marketplace packages in Q3. As Alex mentioned, our top two marketplace tiers now bundle more media features for better vehicle merchandising and promotion, helping dealers attract and convert in-market shoppers. Migration of legacy preferred customers into new premium and premium plus packages was 100% complete as of the end of October. I'll also note that we've seen very few cancellations attributable to this exercise, another encouraging signal of the value dealers see in our marketplace. Marketplace, our most scaled solution, is also the tip of the spear for customer acquisition and cross-selling, and key to winning dealer market share over time. It's therefore encouraging to see that marketplace continues to be the biggest quarter-over-quarter contributor to dealer account growth. and is the linchpin for our net gain of over 300 dealer customers since the start of the year. We have multiple levers to inflect ARPD, driving new customer growth as well as upgrading package tiers and cross-selling against our installed base. And this is amplified by our improved pricing. We saw early signs of these levers in action in Q3, with ARPD up 1% quarter over quarter. And we are optimistic that trends will improve as these positive changes gain further traction and annualize. Overall, dealer revenue growth more than offset near-term noise in OEM and national revenue, which was down just under $1 million, or 5% year over year. As previously mentioned, lower spending by two customers accounted for almost the entirety of the OEM revenue decline in the quarter, and we're already at work rebuilding the revenue pipeline with those partners. More broadly speaking, media investments did taper in September as the industry digested large-scale changes, like strong pull-forward demand from expiration of EB credits and continuing shifts in production, as well as downward revisions in SAR. Given last September was our best month of OEM revenue for 2024, we also had a challenging comp that accentuated this late quarter trend. We're observing that OEMs continue to prefer more flexibility in the current operating environment, and as such, we expect their ad spending may fluctuate through the end of this year. However, we remain confident in our audience and value delivery and in our ability to power growth in this segment. Turning to our cost discussion, third quarter operating expenses were $165 million, down 2% year-over-year. Compared to the prior year period, cost efficiencies in headcount and lease-related expenses, as well as lower depreciation and amortization, fully offset new dealer clip costs and slightly higher marketing and GNA spend. Adjusted operating expenses were $150 million, down 4% year-over-year. for substantially similar reasons. For the following line item detail, all comparisons are on a year-over-year basis, unless otherwise noted. Product and technology expenditures decreased $1.6 million on a reported basis and $1 million on an adjusted basis, fully offsetting dealer cup costs through lower compensation and third-party fees. Marketing and sales increased $1 million on both a reported and adjusted basis, reflecting marketing investments. And general and administrative expense was up $2.8 million year-over-year on a reported basis, but was roughly flat on an adjusted basis. The reported increase was primarily due to increased third-party costs that were partially offset by savings from the lease amendment completed in Q4 2024. Net income for the third quarter was $7.7 million, or 12 cents per diluted share, compared to net income of $18.7 million, or 28 cents per diluted share, a year ago. The difference in net income is primarily due to changes in the fair value of contingent consideration for prior acquisitions that were included in the prior year period. Adjusted net income for the third quarter was $30.4 million, or 48 cents per diluted share, compared to $27.7 million, or 41 cents per diluted share, a year ago. Adjusted EBITDA of $55 million in the third quarter grew 7% year-over-year, benefiting from both higher revenue and cost controls. Third quarter adjusted EBITDA margin of 30.1% demonstrated strong revenue flow-through, benefit from the cost management initiatives described earlier, and timing of certain costs. Now on to key metrics. Dealer count was up in the third quarter based on strength across all of our major product brands. Websites grew sequentially by 67 subscribers, with most of the growth coming in the U.S. AccuTrade grew by 82 subscribers sequentially, about half of whom came from the enterprise deal announced last quarter. Third quarter ARPD was $2,460, up 1% quarter over quarter and down slightly year over year. Recent customer and product mix shifts, like faster independent dealer growth and lower media attach rates, continue to have a near-term leveling effect on this metric. However, as previously discussed, we have multiple ways to inflect ARPD over time. First, new customer acquisition and continued up-tier migration will both benefit from new marketplace and website rates. A good example is Marketplace Premium Plus Adoption, which grew 50% month over month from September to October as dealer awareness increased. Second, moving website customers up tier remains a substantial opportunity. Recall, roughly 70% of Marketplace customers are in a premium or better subscription, relative to just 50% for websites. Third, cross-selling additional products like Accutrade or media add-ons to marketplace customers can be as much as a 60% jump relative to current ARPD. The multiplier effect is especially evident when looking at customers who utilize all four of our brands and have an ARPD that is three times higher than our reported average. With these levers at our disposal, we're confident in future ARPD improvement as we expand our platform's reach. Now over to cash flow and the balance sheet. Net cash provided by operating activities totaled $115 million for the first nine months of the year, compared to $123 million for the comparable period last year. Recall that the earn out for the D to C acquisition has a contractual step up from year one to year two and accounts for the majority of the variance in operating cash flow. Free cash flow was $94.5 million year-to-date, down slightly year-over-year from the acquisition item mentioned above. Year-to-date, share buybacks totaled 5.2 million shares for $64 million, as we utilized more than two-thirds of free cash flow for our repurchase program. Last quarter, we raised our full-year repurchase target to $70 to $90 million, and we're pleased to be on pace to finish the year towards the high end of that range. We also paid down $5 million of our revolver in Q3, bringing debt outstanding to $455 million as of September 30, 2025, equivalent to a total net leverage ratio of 1.9 times. Notably, this is also the first time that we have sat below the low end of our target net leverage range of 2 to 2.5 times. Total liquidity was $350 million as of September 30th, 2025, which provides us ample capacity for capital allocation priorities and other avenues of value creation. And now we'll conclude with outlook. We are reaffirming our expectation for low single-digit revenue growth year over year in the second half of 2025. We expect to achieve this target through continued execution of our growth initiatives. namely improved dealer count and product adoption, and repackaging for marketplace and websites. As in the prior quarter, this outlook assumes today's macroeconomic conditions as a stable baseline for the remainder of the year. Considering third quarter trends and historical fourth quarter performance, we believe that some degree of discretionary media investment is subject to greater variability. both to the upside and the downside, from factors like pull-forward consumer demand, inventory levels, new model launches, and manufacturer incentives. We are also reaffirming adjusted EBITDA margin outlook for fiscal 2025, between 29% to 31%, reflecting disciplined cost management, high contribution margin from pricing initiatives, and revenue growth. Looking ahead, we remain focused on execution and are confident we will deliver improved operating and financial results. And with that, I'd like to open the call for Q&A. Operator?

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. Should you have a question, please press the star followed by the number one on your touchtone phone. You will hear a prompt that your hand has been raised. Should you wish to decline from the polling process, please press the star followed by the number two. If you are using a speakerphone, please lift the handset before pressing any keys. One moment, please, for your first question. Your first question is from Tom White from D.A. Davidson. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. Two if I could. I guess first off, just on the drivers of revenue in the third quarter, it was impressive to see that you delivered a bit of kind of upside versus kind of expectations on revenues despite national kind of declining sequentially when we all were fingers crossed that it might be up a little bit. So just can you help us? I guess what I'm trying to understand is on dealer revenue, Obviously, you guys are doing stuff on repackaging and product, but maybe first off, just on the industry backdrop, and you added dealers again for the third straight quarter. It sounds like you're going to add dealers again, and it sounds like marketplace is maybe one of the main areas where you're adding dealers. I don't know. How would you characterize how dealers are sort of navigating the current industry backdrop? Are they leaning into you guys on Marketplace because they need to find new sources of demand? Is it because of maybe the words getting out that some of the new media stuff that you're adding to the higher tiers is really attractive? Sorry for the long-winded question, but maybe just trying to unpack that a little bit, and then I have a quick follow-up.

Tom, thanks for your question. I'll start, maybe then Sonya can get some color on the revenue mix. But I'll start, you know, obviously manufacturers have got some near-term headwinds that certainly are impacting their business. We feel good about the business because overall enthusiasm for our audience, particularly the concentration of new car shoppers that we have in our marketplace, remain scaled, healthy, and strong. And so the vast majority of our OEM partners are leaning in, not only this year, but also next year. We did have some pullback in the quarter from two OEMs that were temporary in sentiment, not performative, meaning that they had their own internal issues and that delayed their investments with us in the period. That's why we feel fundamentally bullish about the business overall and our ability to continue to grow OEM revenue heading into next year and beyond. I think on the dealer side, it is a little bit of a mixed bag right now. I think dealerships are struggling with softening demand and the vast majority of dealer investments are chasing impressions and clicks. across the internet. And I think the smart dealers are realizing tapping into in-market car shoppers who are actively in market is a much surer path to sales. And so we're pleased with dealer adoption, not only in the quarter. And as you noted, that growth continued into October. And so we're feeling good about dealers realizing the strength of our scaled audience. Certainly some of the product innovation that we're doing on the AI front has garnered some dealer interest as well. But ultimately, we feel like the market is realizing our strength and our value. Sonia, you want to comment on the revenue buildup?

Yeah, thanks for the question, Tom. Just to add a little bit more incremental color, I mean, I think we're pretty pleased to see growth across all of our dealer product lines. Um, repackaging was probably the most immediate benefit to the quarter. As you think about revenue, we had repackaging in, in marketplace with upgrades into premium and then the launch of our new premium plus package. And also we continue to work on optimizing our, our website packages. I think the new dealer customer ads we've had in, in kind of, you know, really since the beginning of, of, of the year, with the exception of January, we've grown dealer account month over month. is really just adding additional fuel to how we think about the opportunity to continue growth on a go-forward basis as we upgrade and cross-sell those incremental new dealers coming into the mix.

Okay, that's really helpful. Maybe just a quick follow-up on that. I think I heard you say that in Marketplace, maybe 70% of the dealers were on something other than just sort of the base tier, but it was lower in websites. So I guess as you think about, how should we think about, you know, like what products you might maybe add to higher tiers in website to kind of get, you know, to get folks to upgrade? Is it more like kind of media add-ons or just any color and you can share there and maybe a timeline for how you expect that to roll out? Thanks.

Yeah, look, I think one of the strengths of our platform strategy, Tom, is that our innovation can take place on our marketplace, and then we can deploy that technology to our dealer partners on their website. So one of the big benefits that our website customers enjoy over the last year is the fortification of our our cloud infrastructure to make sure our websites are meeting and beating Core Web Vital standards because we're able to leverage our larger infrastructure to optimize speed and performance. That's sort of an underlying benefit of our platform model. I think if you look at what we've done on cars.com with launching Carson and OpenText, The generative AI search, you know, we can now deploy that technology on dealer websites. So that's one of the utilities that we're looking ahead towards next year. But then obviously just even indexing dealer websites into the LLM. We use Cloudflare technology to help index cars.com listings into the AI models. And now that we have our dealer websites fortified with Cloudflare as well, we can do more for dealer websites and get their content indexed in the LLMs as well. So I think there's multiple benefits for dealers running on our backbone platform, but the product innovation is accelerating in the company, and we're excited to keep that going.

Great, thanks. And again, next quarter.

Thank you, Tom.

Your next question is from Gary Prestapino from Barrington. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning, all. Hey, Sonia, really interesting when you're talking about the amount of entities on dealers that have moved to repackaging and website that have moved to repackaging. You also gave some... statistics on what the lift is in ARPD for some of these repackaging efforts, and I didn't quite get that.

The lift to ARPD, I mean, I think overall we're pretty happy to see the sequential momentum that we started to achieve in ARPD. So we saw quarter over quarter growth. And I think that puts us on strong footing as we look from Q3 into Q4 to continue to accelerate that. I don't think we gave specific color on the portion of ARPD that was driven by packages, but what may be helpful is to understand the spread difference between a premium and premium plus package. One of the key differentiators, and those are marketplace packages, One of the key differentiators between those two packages is we've bundled VIN Performance Media into the Premium Plus package. That's something that retails for around $1,500 a month. But, you know, obviously for our Premium Plus customers, since it's bundled, they're going to be getting a slightly better rate than that. But it'll give you a sense for how we're trying to create differentiation, not just in price, but also in terms of the overall value delivery we're offering to dealers across our packages. okay um i thought i heard you say something about a three times lift so that's why i asked the question maybe i just typed oh yes i did i did talk about that as like an example of platform value and how as we increase product penetration we're able to really meaningfully lift arpd and i think the stat that i shared was that um dealers who use our major product pillars will have a three times higher ARPD than our reported average.

Okay, that's great. That's what I wanted to get to. And then, Alex, in terms of both AccuTrade and Dealer Club, it's good to see that these things are starting to get more traction. But in terms of appraisals versus actual sell-through, to the dealer from the appraisal. Can you kind of slap some metrics on that? And then in terms of dealer club, I know it's real early, but if you could give us some indication of what kind of volume is going through dealer club, that would be real helpful.

Sure, Gary. Well, first of all, we were really pleased with the growing dealer participation in Accutrade as well as the improving appraisal volume. It's showing what we believe is a very durable trend of dealers realizing that sourcing cars directly from customers is a far more profitable strategy than traditional or legacy auctions. And so that realization is helping every dealer recreate the advantage of creating more inventory in their own service lane which increases our supply, and then also it creates demand within their own dealership because now their customers need new cars. And so we think this is a very durable strategy that dealers are adopting. You're seeing dealers talk more at 20 groups about how they can source more cars directly. And we've got the tooling to enable them to do that at scale and on a very low cost basis. When you think about the cost of an Accutrade subscription, it dwarfs what buying cars at auctions is. is costing the industry so so again very healthy trends on dealer adoption and appraisal volume i think dealer club obviously complements this this strategy which is enabling dealerships to trade cars amongst themselves as a collective as opposed to paying you know the the mighty toll booth operator the physical auction and so dealer adoption on dealer club we're pleased with it As you know, it's very early stage. We're barely getting started here with Dealer Club, but we're pleased with the initial momentum that the platform is generating on a very low cost basis because it's part of our platform strategy, meaning that we're leveraging the infrastructure that we have today in-house. Dealers are pleased that now we're showing them their aged inventory from our marketplace. in the club and they can immediately launch those cars to a wholesale auction with limited to no additional data entry and so stay tuned we're going to continue to invest in the product platform and give dealers more tooling that makes their their workflow even easier but very pleased with the initial momentum both with accutrade and dealer club okay thank you

Your next question is from Rajat Gupta from JP Morgan Chase. Please go ahead.

Hi, thanks for asking the questions. I had one broader question on the competitive landscape. You know, one of the peers recently announced their intention to go private. You know, we've had some tough results from, you know, some of our other public peers on the marketplace side, you know, the auction side and the used car side. I'm just curious that if you're observing any changes in the competitive landscape, you know, be it pricing, you know, be it more adjacent players maybe participating in the market. I'm curious if anything has taken a step change in recent months that you're seeing. And if anything, like, how are you planning to navigate that? And I have a quick follow-up.

Yeah, look, Raja, thanks for the question. I think on the competitive landscape, while there could be changes in terms of public versus private, we look at the competitive landscape a little bit differently in that dealerships are trying to drive traffic to themselves directly, and they're spending inordinate amounts of capital trying to interrupt consumers while they perform other tasks to drive them into their stores. The benefit of our platform strategy is we're the largest provider concentration of organic car shoppers that are spending their shopping time researching and deciding what and where to buy on our platform. And we think savvy dealers are realizing that interruptive advertising is less efficient than native marketplace traffic that we can source and drive consumers directly to their stores. Particularly as average dealers are trying to compete with Carvana and larger platforms using cars.com as a demand engine for their business, we think is a no-brainer. And so I look at the competitive landscape more about how do we get dealers to spend less on Google or less in traditional media and do more digitally first and foremost. I've got tons of respect for my digital peer set. I know auto is a very competitive category, but we feel very confident because, again, we source the majority of our traffic organically or directly, and so we're a complement to dealers and their advertising mix. I also will say our platform strategy is differentiated. We're now powering north of 9,000 dealer websites, helping them optimize their retail presence online. We're giving them tools to operate their business with more self-sufficiency, which we think we can help overall bring their profitability to new levels. And so we're excited about our innovation roadmap on AI. and what that can do and help dealers add capabilities to their business. And again, marketplaces are competitive, but we've got a much more differentiated and ambitious strategy.

Understood. Understood. That's helpful. And then within your dealer demographic, I mean, is it possible to provide a split across, you know, if it's meaningful difference across like luxury, domestic or import? you know, on the franchise dealer side. I ask only because, you know, we're starting to see some of the European brands feel the brunt of tariffs. You know, it looks like October started off a little weak for those brands. I'm just wondering, you know, if that can have any meaningful impact on churn rates, on RPD, you know, for your business. I'm just curious if you're hearing anything as well on that front.

Well, listen, I know it's a very dynamic marketplace right now. As you know about our business, we tend to skew up market. The bulk of our dealers are franchise dealerships. The bulk of our audience tends to be late model, even new car shoppers. That's why we have a large OEM business, unlike our peers, because manufacturers know that new car shoppers are also considering late model used. And so we tend to skew up market and therefore don't feel some of the same pressures that perhaps some of the credit challenged or lower end of the market may experience. And so we feel very fortified heading into, you know, next year in that the bulk of our audience tends to be more affluent, higher household income, and our dealer base also remains the stronger side of the market as well with franchise dealers making up the majority of our revenue mix.

Understood. Maybe just a final one on capital allocation. You're starting to see a return back to top-line growth. You're seeing some good progress with dealer additions. I'm curious if we can expect... I'm just trying to see how you rank water capital allocation today. Is buyback still the number one priority? Are there other avenues that you're looking at? Thanks.

Yeah, no, thanks for the question. I think we are still committed to share repurchases as an important portion of our overall capital allocation strategy. Pleased to see how kind of the growth in adjusted EBITDA in particular is helping to bring net leverage down. Our net leverage ratio continues to kind of improve. But we're tracking towards the high end of our share repurchase range based on how we've been buying back on a year-to-date basis, and we still see upside there.

Got it. Okay, great. Thanks for all the color.

Your next question is from Marvin Fong from BITG. Please go ahead.

Great. Good morning. Thanks for the question. Very nice quarter here. I would like to start with Accutrade a little bit deeper on that. So, you know, kind of consistent in the 70-80 dealer edition range the last three quarters. Just like to kind of get a little more color on the pipeline there. And should we kind of think of this as a good taste of ads or do you think can accelerate that? And is it going to be sort of lumpy with sort of the larger enterprise or larger dealers in there? Or do you kind of expect it to be kind of smooth? And then just remind us on that large dealer group that added about half the ads this quarter, how many more stores are in their system that you haven't penetrated yet?

Yeah, well, first of all, look, we're pleased to close an enterprise deal last quarter for Accutrade. And that, I think, was just about half the dealer count growth in the queue because we still have steady dealer adoption and growth. We're also basically continuing to see dealer group interest in standardizing their vehicle sourcing strategy, which we think is a big tailwind for Accutrade because we can provide dealer groups consistent tooling that puts a process in place that they can manage their vehicle sourcing strategy with tools that give them enterprise leverage and consistency in how they run their operation. So we're seeing strong interest in continued dealer demonstrations and a healthy pipeline there. We're also hearing dealers asking us for more inventory syndication capabilities with Accutrade. So that's on our innovation roadmap, which could be another tailwind. But, you know, we're overall pleased with the organic momentum we have in our dealer count. We think enterprise deals with larger dealer groups can continue to be a strong trend. addition to our platform if we were able to secure more of these enterprise deals in Q4 and beyond. But, you know, this is a slow roll strategy that will scale over time, and it certainly adds meaningful ARPD and a higher reoccurrence of revenue because the dealers that standardize with AccuTrade, not only does that revenue, you know, stay sticky in our platform, but it has a halo effect for our other subscription offerings as well, including dealer club as well. So we're, we're feeling good about the business.

Got it. And thanks for that. And second questions on, on AI, everyone's favorite topic. And I guess I'd ask, ask it a whole different way. So, so first, um, Are you seeing any meaningful traffic today that's coming from like a chat GPP type service? And if so, how is the behavior of those customers? Is it converting leads any better than other traffic?

Yeah, well, first of all, Margaret, thanks for the question. On the AI front, we're very pleased. As we mentioned during the call, when you look at all the leading AI consumer engines, we are, in many cases, 2X our nearest, closest publicly traded peer. And so that is a testament to the strength of the Cars.com brand and our decade-long commitment to independent expertise and editorial depth and breadth and quality. And so our strength there is being played back to us by these LLMs that recognize our authority. As you know, auto is a multi-touch, omni-channel experience, meaning consumers are seeking out multiple destinations prior to purchase. our brand strength and our authority in these engines while it may not generate a ton of traffic today it is amplifying our brand strength which is why we had record traffic in q3 and feel very strong about continued momentum of our marketplace. Consumers are going to seek out trusted, independent expertise in auto, and these new AI models are affirming our brand strength. And so we feel very good about the advent of AI and what it can do for our business over time as well.

I would just maybe add, in addition to what Alex was talking about in terms of how we're showing up in the various AI search tools. We're also really pleased with how leveraging AI and natural language search on our own marketplace is helping to drive increased consumer engagement. We see on the order of three times more vehicles saved for consumers who use Carson. They're looking at two times more listings. They return more frequently. So we're actually playing this as like a, it's a multi-pronged strategy, I really believe, to leverage AI to the benefit of the business. And we're seeing it translate into real engagement numbers.

Right. And that was sort of my second part of the question, I guess, through Roxanne. Are you able to see how many people who are using Karsten or your other AI-related search tools, are they purchasing or more attribution? I mean, given the cars, if they are using Karsten compared to someone that's not using the AI tool, what would that tool look like?

Obviously, this is still a category where the majority of time is spent online and the purchase is offline. And we know that dealer CRMs grossly under-recognize our value delivery. I mean, there's only 5 million cars retailed every month in this country, and we know we're saturating the majority of car buyers on our platform. What I like about what we're seeing with Carson is that users are saving more vehicles in their search history. So they're coming back at two times the rate of other shoppers. They're generating more leads compared to people that are using directive search as opposed to more exploratory. We also know that 70% of our users are undecided on make and model selection. So we're going back to OEMs. who previously maybe haven't realized the power of our search engine, that they can influence undecided shoppers on our platform. And we're seeing higher conversion rate of these users in terms of tangible leads to dealers. And so, you know, consumer engagement is critical to thrive in any marketplace, and Carson is showing us a lot more potential what we can do on the user experience front to connect customers brands and dealers to our audience using AI as an advantage. So I expect to see a steady quarterly stream of innovations here that both improve user experience and also drive down our operating costs.

Okay, that sounds great. Thanks, Al. Your next question is from Khan Navit from B-Rally Securities.

Please go ahead.

Thank you very much. Maybe just on the marketplace repackaging initiative, I know you've been using opt-ins for dealers to kind of migrate up to the higher tier. Is there any plan to kind of accelerate that maybe so that more of the dealers can migrate to the higher tiers, or do you continue to see it as an opt-in move? So that's my first question. And the second question I have is just around the traffic growth kind of, can you just maybe talk about organic versus paid mix and AI overviews, if it had any impact at all, at least from the headline numbers, looks like not, but just talk about how you're thinking about the traffic growth.

Sure.

Well, first of all, I'll start, Sonia, and then you can maybe comment on the repackaging. I think our sales go-to-market motion is constantly showing dealers the strength of upgrading to our premium tiers. And we've got demonstrable data that shows the more dealers spend, the more value and market share they can generate. they can get on our marketplace. And so that will be a rolling benefit for us to educate dealers on the strength of higher tiers. And as Sonia pointed out earlier, like we've got a lot of headroom to go there on the repackaging front. And I think we can also continue to introduce new tools and features that help dealers gravitate towards higher spending levels on our marketplace and even cross-selling other solutions. I think also on the AI front, this is early innings. We're really pleased with the initial response that we're seeing with consumers using AI in our marketplace. We also are pleased with how we're showing up organically in all the leading LLMs and, you know, The AEO optimization strategy, I'd say, is in the early stages here, but our brand strength and our unique content certainly give us distinct advantages to our peers. I don't know, Sonia, what else you'd add to that?

No, I think, Alex, you covered it really well. I was just going to add on repackaging, you know, we continue to be focused in on the The opt-in model, it provides us better outcomes overall with the dealers when they're bought into the rationale and the expectation of why they're moving up tier. And we've seen good traction with it, right? Like I think we cited a stat in earlier around premium plus, and we saw a 50% increase in premium plus from September to October. So we'll continue to focus on the benefits of moving up here in terms of the value delivery creation.

Great. Thank you, Alex. Thank you, Sonia. Your next question is from Joe Spack from UBS. Please go ahead.

Thanks. Good morning. Sonia, the first question just on the guidance, the way you guide obviously gets some decently wide ranges based on your disclosures, but if I look sort of the past few years, seasonality, it looks like 4Q EBITDA is about 10% higher quarter over quarter, which would mean something around $60 million, which obviously clearly falls within that implied range. I just want to make sure we're all level set. Is that sort of like a good level to calibrate upon? And what do you really think sort of drives the higher end versus the lower end here with basically two months left in the year?

Yeah, no, this is a great question. Thank you.

I think in terms of adjusted EBITDA, you know, what the benefit that we really saw in Q3, some of it came from revenue, some of high flow through on revenue, some of it came from continued cost management, and then a portion of it was a little bit more timing oriented. So we feel pretty comfortable with our overall adjusted EBITDA range, but I would say getting towards the higher end of that range probably requires a little bit more of that episodic revenue to come in that tends to be a little bit higher margin. So it would require a heavier lift on, let's say, the OEM and national side of the business to get closer to the high end of the range.

Okay, and the update there was there's still some pause, and I know they committed to that spend, but it could bleed into next year. Is that still the message? Yeah.

Yeah, we're seeing, you know, a little bit more like kind of like we talked about in September. Some of that pressure has been continuing into October. Now, as I mentioned, periodically, we will see as we get towards the end of the year, some of them will lean into those budgets a little bit more. And also, I think some of the overhang, you know, production numbers where SAR is sitting right now are probably a little bit of a drag on expectations as well.

Okay. And then on Carson, and I apologize, this might be a very ignorant question, but I'm just trying to sort of understand all the AI stuff. Is it just trained on the data you have access to, like your dealership customers, or is it broader? And then out of curiosity, is there anything that prevents other AI agents from accessing the data you have on your site. It sounds like you actually want to feed that, but if you do, is there a way to guarantee that those other solutions, you know, almost like don't cut you out and go through your site and not around cars.com? I don't know if that makes sense or I'm misinterpreting the technology, but if you could sort of...

Joe, it's a great question, so thank you. So, Carson, you know, we're leveraging our data infrastructure to power and train Carson. You know, we've got millions and millions of data signals flowing through our systems every day, and so Carson's intelligence continues to be self-taught and self-fed on all these automotive intentions and searches. and behaviors. By the way, we put out a press release on Carson today, so you can read more about how consumers are interacting with Carson. Certainly, the large consumer-facing LLMs are able to train off our data as well, and so while there is risk that consumers can render answers on these other What they do do is attribute their knowledge to cars.com. And we think that is incredible brand exposure and leverages our deep authority to make consumers aware that Cars.com has knowledge. And automotive is uniquely a multi-touch category. Unlike a lot of consumer goods or low price point purchases, consumers may only seek out one to two destinations. But buying a car is the second largest transaction in people's lives. They're going to seek out multiple sources of information prior to purchase. And we certainly think the LLMs Constantly referencing cars.com as an authority is going to continue to generate traffic directly to us as consumers go to get additional information, research on which dealerships have the best reputations. what they could expect to pay, any OEM incentives that are available. There's just a lot of information consumption in this category that makes me certain that no one destination can disrupt the 20-year strength of our brand and our content expertise.

Thanks. That's incredibly insightful. Thank you. Thank you, Joe.

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