Cars.com Inc. (NYSE:CARS) Q3 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Cars.com Inc. (NYSE:CARS) Q3 2025 Earnings Call Transcript November 7, 2025

Operator: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Cars Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] This call is being recorded on Thursday, November 6, 2025. I would now like to turn the conference over to Katherine Chen. Please go ahead.

Katherine Chen: 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 Vetter, 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 margin, 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.

Alex Vetter: Thank you, Katherine. We were pleased to achieve record revenue and drive strong customer and product momentum in the third quarter on our path to reaccelerating growth. Revenue of $182 million reflected continued contribution from websites, trade and appraisal solutions and marketplace. Dealer count increased for the third consecutive quarter as we reached a new 3-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 through the end of Q3, setting a new record. Our leading editorial and brand expertise is evident from third-party data that shows that we were 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 road map 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 3x 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 #1 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 2 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 DealerClub 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 DealerClub address 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. Accu Trade grew to 1,150 subscribers in Q3 and DealerClub 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-mile inventory that dealers access when they expand beyond traditional and 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 5 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, 2 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 we’re 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?

Sonia Jain: 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 repackaging activities and better customer count.

Our ongoing repackaging work resulted in successful renegotiation of additional OEM website agreements and the phased launch of new marketplace packages in Q3. As Alex mentioned, our top 2 marketplace peers 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 count 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 2 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 EV credits and continuing shifts in production as well as downward revisions in SAAR. 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 club costs and slightly higher marketing and G&A 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 club 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 $0.12 per diluted share compared to net income of $18.7 million or $0.28 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 $0.48 per diluted share compared to $27.7 million or $0.41 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 4 of our brands and have an ARPD that is 3x higher than our reported average.

With these levers at our disposal, we are 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 9 months of the year compared to $123 million for the comparable period last year. Recall that the earn-out for the D2C acquisition has a contractual step-up from year 1 to year 2 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 items mentioned above. Year-to-date, share buybacks totaled 5.2 million shares for $64 million as we utilized more than 2/3 of free cash flow for our repurchase program.

Last quarter, we raised our full year repurchase target to $70 million 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 1.9x. Notably, this is also the first time that we have sat below the low end of our target net leverage range of 2 to 2.5x. Total liquidity was $350 million as of September 30, 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?

Q&A Session

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Your first question is from Tom White from D.A. Davidson.

Thomas White: 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 I think we all have our 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, kind of the — obviously, you guys are doing stuff on repackaging and product. But maybe first off, just like 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 kind of maybe one of the main areas where you’re adding dealers.

I don’t know, how would you kind of characterize how dealers are sort of navigating the current just kind of industry backdrop? Like are they leaning into you guys on marketplace because they’re — they need to find new sources of demand? Is it because of maybe the word is getting out that some of the new media stuff that you’re adding to the higher tiers is really attractive. Sorry, it’s a long-winded question, but just maybe just trying to unpack that a little bit. And then I have a quick follow-up.

Alex Vetter: Tom, thanks for your question. I’ll start, maybe then Sonia can give some color on the revenue mix. But I’ll start. 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, remains 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 2 OEMs that were temporary in sentiment, not performative, meaning that they had their own internal issues 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, do you want to comment on the revenue buildup?

Sonia Jain: Yes. 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. Repackaging was probably the most immediate benefit to the quarter as you think about revenue. We had repackaging 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 website packages. I think the new dealer customer adds we’ve had in kind of really since the beginning of the year with the exception of January, we’ve grown dealer count 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.

Thomas White: 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 like what products you might maybe add to higher tiers in website to kind of get — to get folks to upgrade? Is it more like kind of media add-ons? Or just any color you can share there and maybe a time line for how you expect that to roll out?

Alex Vetter: Yes. 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 cloud infrastructure to make sure dealer 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, generative AI search, 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 Cloudfare technology to help index Cars.com listings into the AI models. And now that we have our dealer websites fortified with Cloudfare 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.

Operator: Your next question is from Gary Prestopino from Barrington.

Gary Prestopino: Sonia, really interesting when you’re talking about the amount of entities that — 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.

Sonia Jain: 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. We didn’t — 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 like 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 2 packages is we bundled VIN Performance Media into the Premium Plus package. That’s something that retails for around $1,500 a month, but obviously, for our Premium Plus customers since it’s bundled, they’re going to be getting a slightly better rate than that.

But it will 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.

Gary Prestopino: Okay. I thought I heard you say something about a 3x lift. So that’s why I asked the question. And maybe I just typed…

Sonia Jain: Yes. 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 dealers who use our major product pillars will have a 3x higher ARPD than our reported average.

Gary Prestopino: Okay. That’s great. That’s what I wanted to get to. And then Alex, in terms of both AccuTrade and DealerClub, 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 DealerClub, I know it’s real early, but if you could give us some indication of what kind of volume is going through DealerClub, that would be real helpful.

Alex Vetter: 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 costing the industry. So again, very healthy trends on dealer adoption and appraisal volume. I think DealerClub obviously complements this strategy, which is enabling dealerships to trade cars amongst themselves as a collective as opposed to paying the mighty toll booth operator, the physical auction. And so dealer adoption on DealerClub, we’re pleased with it. As you know, it’s very early stage. We’re barely getting started here with DealerClub, 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 workflow even easier, but very pleased with the initial momentum, both with AccuTrade and DealerClub.

Operator: Your next question is from Rajat Gupta from JPMorgan Chase.

Rajat Gupta: I had one broader question on just the competitive landscape. One of your peers recently announced their intention to go private. We’ve had some tough results from some of our other public peers on the marketplace side, on the auction side, on the used car side. I’m just curious that if you’re observing any changes in the competitive landscape, be it pricing, be it more adjacent players maybe participating in the market. And 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.

Alex Vetter: Yes. Look, Rajat, 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 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 more — 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 road map on AI and what that can do and help dealers add capabilities to their business. And again, like marketplaces are competitive, but we’ve got a much more differentiated and ambitious strategy.

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

Alex Vetter: Well, listen, I know it’s a very dynamic marketplace right now. As you know about our business that we tend to skew upmarket. 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 upmarket 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 next year in that the bulk of our audience tends to be more affluent, higher household income. And then our dealer base also remains the stronger side of the market as well with franchise dealers making up the majority of our revenue mix.

Rajat Gupta: Understood. Maybe just final one on capital allocation. You’re starting to see like a return back to top line growth. You’re seeing some good progress with like dealer additions. I’m curious if we can expect — I’m just trying to see like how you rank order capital allocation today. Is buyback still the #1 priority? Are there other avenues that you’re looking at?

Sonia Jain: Yes. 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 that 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 the upside there.

Operator: Your next question is from Marvin Fong from BTIG.

Marvin Fong: Very nice quarter here. I would like to start on AccuTrade a little bit deeper on that. So kind of consistent in the 70 to 80 dealer addition range in the last 3 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 pace of adds? Or do you think you can accelerate that? And is it going to be sort of lumpy with sort of the larger enterprise or larger dealers in there or you kind of expect [indiscernible]. And then can you just remind us on that large dealer group that added about half the adds this quarter, how many more stores are in their system that you haven’t penetrated yet?

Alex Vetter: Yes. Well, first of all, look, we’re pleased to close an enterprise deal last quarter for AccuTrade. And that, I think, was about — just about half the dealer count growth in the Q 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 and 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 road map, which could be another tailwind. But 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 addition to our platform if we are able to secure more of these enterprise deals in Q4 and beyond. But this is a slow roll strategy that will scale over time, and it certainly adds meaningful ARPD and a high reoccurrence of revenue because the dealers that standardize with AccuTrade, not only does that revenue stay sticky in our platform, but it has a halo effect for our other subscription offerings as well, including DealerClub as well.

So we’re feeling good about the business.

Marvin Fong: Got it. And second question is on AI, everyone’s favorite topic. And I guess I’d ask it a couple of different ways. So first, are you seeing any meaningful traffic today that’s coming from like a ChatGPT type service? And how — if so, how is the behavior of those customers? Does it convert to leads any better than other traffic?

Alex Vetter: Yes. Well, first of all, 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 omnichannel 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 firming 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.

Sonia Jain: I would just maybe add in addition to what Alex was talking about in terms of how we’re showing up in the various like 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 3x more vehicles saved for consumers who use Carson. They’re looking at 2x more listings. They return more frequently. So we’re actually playing this as like it’s a multipronged strategy, I really believe, to leverage AI to the benefit of the business, and we’re seeing it translate into real engagement numbers.

Marvin Fong: Right. And that was sort of my second part of the question, I guess, to Carson, are you able to see how many people who are using Carson or your other AI-related search tools, are they purchasing or more attribution can be given the Cars if they are using Carson compared to someone that’s not using the AI tools? Or is it too early to say?

Alex Vetter: Yes. 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 2x the rate of other shoppers. They’re generating more leads compared to people that are using directed 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 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 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.

Operator: Your next question is from Khan Naved from B. Riley Securities.

Naved Khan: 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. Are there — 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? 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, it looks like not, but just talk about how you’re thinking about the traffic.

Alex Vetter: Sure. Well, first of all, our sales — 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 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 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?

Sonia Jain: No, I think, Alex, you covered it really well. I was just going to add on repackaging. We continue to be focused in on the opt-in model. It buys 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-tier in terms of the value delivery creation.

Operator: Your next question is from Joe Spak from UBS.

Joseph Spak: Sonia, first question just on the guidance. The way you guide obviously give some decently wide ranges based on your disclosures. But if I look at 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 2 months left in the year?

Sonia Jain: Yes. No, this is a great question. Thank you. I think in terms of adjusted EBITDA, what the benefit that we really saw in Q3, some of it came from revenue, some of the 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 some — 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.

Joseph Spak: 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 a metric?

Sonia Jain: Yes. We’re seeing 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 production numbers, where SAAR is sitting right now are probably a little bit of a drag on expectations as well.

Joseph Spak: 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 like 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 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…

Alex Vetter: No. Joe, it’s a great question. So thank you. So Carson, we’re leveraging our data infrastructure to power and train Carson. We’ve got millions and millions of data signals flowing through our systems every day. And so Carson’s intelligence continues to be self-thought 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, we let — 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 environments, 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 1 to 2 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.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] There are no further questions at this time. Please proceed with closing remarks.

Katherine Chen: Thanks, everyone, for joining the call. We’ll see some of you on the road very soon, and I appreciate the support, and have a good day. Thank you.

Operator: Ladies and gentleman, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines.