EverQuote, Inc. (EVER) Business

ITEM 1. BUSINESS

Company Overview

We operate a leading online marketplace for insurance shopping, connecting consumers with our insurance provider customers, which includes both carriers and agents. Our vision is to be the leading growth partner for property and casualty, or P&C, insurance providers. Our results-driven marketplace, powered by our proprietary data and technology platform, is improving the way insurance providers attract and connect with consumers shopping for insurance.

We operate a marketplace to connect insurance providers to a large volume of high-intent, pre-validated consumer referrals that match the insurers’ specific underwriting and profitability requirements. The transparency of our marketplace, as well as the campaign management tools we offer, are designed to make it easy for insurance carriers and third-party agents to evaluate the performance of their marketing spend on our platform and manage their own return on investment. We present consumers with a single starting point for a comprehensive insurance shopping experience where consumers can engage with insurance carriers through multiple channels based on their preferences. Our marketplace enables consumers to choose to visit an insurance provider’s website to purchase a policy or engage with a carrier or agent by phone or submit their data to insurance providers to receive quotes. Our services are free for consumers, and we derive our revenue principally from consumer inquiries sold as referrals to insurance providers.

Market Opportunity

P&C insurance is one of the largest segments of the United States economy and is highly fragmented with over 2,500 insurance carriers and over 100,000 insurance agencies, which collectively issued policies representing over $1 trillion in premiums in 2024. To capture new policies and retain their existing customers, U.S. P&C insurance carriers spent $129 billion in 2024 on marketing and distribution. However, carriers face challenges in this market that create a significant opportunity for companies that can efficiently align consumers and providers. These challenges include:

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Misalignment of providers and consumers, creating an inefficient match between supply and demand

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A complex, fragmented and opaque market for consumers

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Inefficient advertising channels for insurance providers

Due to these challenges, insurance providers are seeking more efficient ways to connect with consumers, and as a result the internet has become increasingly influential in consumer insurance shopping, and $8 billion of 2024 insurance carriers’ marketing spend was on digital advertising. The insurance industry is also making products easier to buy and sell through digital channels with the integration and digitalization of insurance products. We believe that the continued rise in digital insurance products and shopping experiences enable more personal, end-to-end shopping experiences, products and services, resulting in more consumers shopping for insurance online.

Our Solution

Our results-driven marketplace, powered by our proprietary data and technology platform, matches and connects consumers seeking to purchase insurance with relevant options from our network of insurance providers, saving consumers and providers time and money.

Proprietary, data-driven technology platform. Our platform efficiently attracts consumers shopping for insurance to our websites and call center, which match them to relevant providers for streamlined quoting. This enables us to maintain high levels of quality control and provide real-time referrals to insurance providers at the moment of the consumer’s purchase intent.

Insurance provider engagement and benefits. Insurance carriers and agents connect with our marketplace through our web-based provider portal. Our portal provides transparent, secure access to marketplace data regarding consumer type, volume and referral pricing, along with sophisticated campaign management tools for targeting consumers based on a wide array of attributes. Our tools are designed to integrate with insurance providers’ internal workflows to minimize administrative burden, and can incorporate quote, bind and lifetime value feedback, enabling providers to evaluate and optimize their acquisition and retention campaigns through a single interface.

We offer insurance providers a number of benefits to enable them to drive profitable growth, such as access to a high volume of insurance shoppers, precise targeting capabilities to ensure they connect with the right prospects, high bind rates for consumer referrals through broad data integration with insurance providers, and a flexible advertising channel.

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Consumer engagement and benefits. We engage with consumers through multiple channels that include our own websites and our third-party publishers’ websites, including verified partners that provide us with quote requests completed by consumers. Additionally, we engage with consumers offline, including through consumer calls placed directly from a call center operated by us, by one of our verified partners, or by a third-party insurance agent.

We aim to make the end-to-end shopping experience for consumers seamless by facilitating delivery of highly relevant insurance product options from a single starting point, reducing time and effort to research and compare insurance product options, and improving the purchase experience to help consumers make better decisions. Broad participation of top-tier insurance carriers within our marketplace enables consumers to efficiently navigate a range of options and offers that are relevant to their insurance coverage searches. By enabling insurance carriers to apply sophisticated targeting, we facilitate access to the most relevant product options for each respective consumer based on consumer-provided demographics and other relevant characteristics.

Our Strengths

We believe that our results driven marketplace provides us a competitive advantage based on the following key strengths:

Proprietary Data Assets and Algorithms. Our marketplace is powered by a proprietary data and technology platform that efficiently attracts insurance shoppers from a diverse and large array of sources, increases the bind rate for consumers, and we believe will drive down the cost of acquisition for providers over time as well as improve our own monetization. Our proprietary data assets and machine learning algorithms efficiently attract consumers, match them with relevant insurance providers and drive our overall business model. We utilize our data assets and machine learning capabilities throughout our business, from advertising and consumer acquisition to the innovation of new consumer and provider experiences, as well as to guide our strategic direction. As our data assets grow, our algorithms become more powerful. We believe our data science capabilities, combining the use of proprietary data assets with scalable machine learning driven automation, give us a significant competitive advantage.

Scale of distribution capacity. Our robust distribution network includes approximately 60 insurance carriers and approximately 6,000 agents representing virtually all major and niche P&C carriers operating in the United States. Our distribution network is a significant competitive advantage that allows us to offer consumers a broad array of insurance solutions and enables us to attract a broad spectrum of consumer traffic efficiently.

Scale of consumer traffic. We attract large volumes of consumer traffic to our marketplace through both our proprietary owned-and-operated assets as well as traffic we purchase through third-party publishers, including our verified partner network. The scale of our combined traffic operations allows us to serve our distribution network with high volumes of consumer traffic across a spectrum of purchasing intent, carrier fit, and lifetime value.

Powerful network effects. Our insurance marketplace benefits from significant network effects. As we attract more consumers to our platform, we collect more data to improve user experience, which in turn improves conversion rates, which we believe will improve consumer satisfaction. Over time, the combination of these factors has increased consumer traffic, leading to more quote requests for our insurance providers. Increased quote requests, combined with quote and bind feedback, improve insurance providers’ advertising and marketing efficiency, resulting in more providers and advertising spend in our marketplace. More providers and advertising spend enable us to attract more consumers, generating more data.

Flexible business model. Our cost structure provides us with the flexibility to react to changes in the business cycle. Our largest expense is advertising spend, which is variable and can be quickly adjusted to market conditions. During periods of economic expansion, we can increase advertising spend to attract consumers to our platform and further enhance the strength of our marketplace. Conversely, during economic downturns, advertising expenses can be rapidly reduced. We are also able to quickly adjust our advertising expense if we believe the revenue associated with it does not result in incremental profit to the business.

Ability to expand with significant operating leverage. We have leveraged our data assets, technology platform and engineering and data science capabilities, along with our growing audience of consumers and network of insurance providers, to expand our platform from the auto insurance market into other markets such as home and renters insurance. We have the ability to enter new verticals with only a modest increase in headcount.

Our Growth Strategies

We aspire to be the leading growth partner of P&C insurance providers. Data-driven innovation is at the core of our strategy, culture and operating focus. With our team of analysts, engineers and business development employees, as well as our relationships with leading third-party insurance providers, we are working to build the largest and most trusted online insurance marketplace in the United States. To achieve this goal, we intend to continue to grow our business by pursuing the following strategies:

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Add more insurance providers and increase revenue per provider. We plan to grow the number of insurance providers on our platform by demonstrating the value proposition of our marketplace as an efficient, scalable customer acquisition channel and adding new provider-facing features. While not a factor in our historical increases in revenue per quote request, we believe we have an opportunity to also increase the number of referrals per quote request while maintaining or increasing the bind rate per quote request, which would allow us to increase our revenue at limited marginal cost. In addition, we plan to expand revenue per provider by increasing consumer traffic and quote request volume, adding verticals and innovating advertiser products and services.

Attract more consumers to our marketplace. We plan to expand the number of consumers reaching our marketplace through existing channels by leveraging the superior features and growing data assets of our platform. In addition, we may launch new marketing channels to acquire consumers both online and offline. We believe that there is an opportunity to attract substantially more high-intent consumers to our existing insurance offerings and that there are further expansion opportunities in adjacent verticals.

Expand our platform. We plan to expand and deepen our relationships with our insurance provider customers by providing additional products and services to them. In addition, we may selectively look for opportunities to expand into additional verticals beyond those currently in our marketplace, through either organic development or acquisition.

Technology and Infrastructure

Our technology platform combines internally developed, third-party and open-source software. This combination allows for rapid development and release of high-performance technology solutions in a cost-effective and scalable manner. Our websites and supporting services, as well as our development and test environments, are hosted across industry-standard cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. We use content delivery network solutions for fast, local access to our products. We use network, website, service and hardware-level monitoring, coupled with remote-content monitoring, to maintain a high level of uptime and availability for our systems with high-performance delivery.

Our Customers

Our insurance provider customers include insurance carriers and third-party insurance agents. Insurance carriers write auto and home and renters insurance policies for consumers directly and through agents. Our marketplace consists of an extensive network of national and regional carriers as well as technology-enabled companies. Our two largest customers accounted for 38% and 11%, respectively, of our total revenue for the year ended December 31, 2025. Our largest customer accounted for 39% of our total revenue for the year ended December 31, 2024. We plan to continue to grow both the number of carriers participating in our marketplace and the level of participation from each carrier. Insurance agents deliver auto and home and renters insurance to consumers on behalf of one or more carriers. As of December 31, 2025, we had approximately 6,000 enrolled insurance agencies on our platform. We are focused on further penetrating the large base of more than 100,000 P&C insurance agencies in the United States.

Sales and Marketing

Our sales and marketing efforts are designed to increase engagement by both insurance providers and consumers and enhance their awareness of our company. Our marketing spend across channels is fundamentally algorithmic and performance based. Over time, we believe we will increase our brand equity and recognition as we serve more ad impressions. Additionally, we have built an efficient, consultative sales and customer success organization, which sells our marketplace referrals to insurance carriers and agencies.

Carrier sales and marketing. Our carrier sales and marketing initiatives are designed to deliver high-value content on how carriers can increase efficiency in their customer acquisition efforts by capitalizing on the increasing targetability and personalization enabled by our marketplace. We develop a deep understanding of our carrier customers’ objectives to optimize their campaign performance and grow their budgets in our marketplace. We focus on building deep relationships and establishing thought leadership among carriers through our presence at industry tradeshows, targeted delivery of whitepapers and other materials, and personal outreach to key decision makers and marketing teams. Our team takes a data-driven approach to helping insurance carriers bind more policies with their target consumers at a lower cost per sale than other channels.

Agent sales and marketing. Our agent sales and marketing initiatives are designed to reach, educate and acquire insurance agents not yet participating in our marketplace. Our agent marketing strategy focuses on educating agents on how consumer buying behavior is changing and increasingly moving online and how they can better acquire and serve consumers in the digital world through participation in our marketplace. We reach new agents online through email, telephone calls, social media, content marketing and in person at tradeshows and conferences. For our current agent customers, we communicate the value of our platform and educate them on its use through our onboarding process, ongoing outreach and account performance reports. Our agency sales team focuses on onboarding new agents. Our customer success team focuses on agent retention and revenue growth. This team analyzes account performance and consults with agents to optimize their participation in our marketplace, help them achieve growth and return-on-investment objectives, expand volume and add products.

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Competition

We face competition to attract consumers to our websites as well as for insurance provider advertising and marketing spend.

Competition for insurance provider advertising and marketing spend. We compete for insurance providers’ advertising and marketing spend with other internet sites, performance marketers and online marketing service providers. We also compete with offline media, such as television, radio and direct mail. We believe we compete favorably on the basis of the scale and quality of our consumer referrals, our seamless handoff capability, our ability to align consumers with our providers’ preferences and business strategies and the targeting capabilities of our platform.

Competition for consumers. The competition for consumer traffic and advertising space online is broad and diverse. Our competitors offer various marketplaces, products and services that compete with us. Some of these competitors include internet search engines and social media platforms; brand advertisers and brand agencies across a spectrum of industries; sites operated by individual insurance providers; finance and credit savings sites; insurance lead-generation, affiliate and aggregator networks; and marketing services providers for insurers and general marketing services providers. We believe we compete favorably in attracting insurance shoppers due to our superior data assets, consumer acquisition technology, team and data sciences management infrastructure. We believe we also compete favorably in converting consumer traffic into referrals and, ultimately, purchased policies due to the depth of our provider network, our consumer matching algorithms and our intuitive and streamlined consumer interface. Furthermore, we believe the breadth of the insurance provider options in our marketplace gives us an inherent advantage over single-brand insurance providers with respect to conversion and bind rates for consumers.

Employees and Human Capital Resources

Our company culture is data-driven, entrepreneurial and innovative. As of January 31, 2026, we had 356 employees, most of which were full-time.

Our human capital is integral to our future success. For that reason, our human capital resources objectives include attracting, retaining, developing and motivating a team of highly skilled employees at all levels. We value our employees and provide them with competitive cash compensation as well as opportunities for equity ownership. The principal purposes of our equity incentive plans are to attract, retain and motivate employees, consultants and directors through the granting of stock-based compensation awards in ways that encourage long-term retention and are aligned with the interests of our stockholders. We value our employees and regularly benchmark total rewards we provide, such as short- and long-term compensation, 401(k) contributions, health, welfare and quality of life benefits, paid time off and personal leave, against our industry peers to ensure we remain competitive and attractive to potential new hires. In addition, we conduct employee surveys to gauge employee engagement and solicit feedback and enhance our understanding of the views of our employees, work environment and culture. The results from engagement surveys are used to implement programs and processes designed to enhance employee engagement and improve the employee experience.

Regulation

Various aspects of our business are, may become, or may be viewed by regulators from time to time as subject, directly or indirectly, to U.S. federal, state, and foreign laws and regulations. We are subject to laws and regulations that apply to businesses in general, such as those relating to worker classification, employment, payments, worker confidentiality obligations, consumer protection and taxation. As an online business, we are also subject to laws and regulations governing the internet, such as those relating to intellectual property ownership and infringement, trade secrets, the distribution of electronic communications, search engines, consumer privacy, and internet tracking technologies, and could be affected by potential changes to laws and regulations that affect the growth, popularity, or use of the internet, including with respect to net neutrality and taxation on the use of the internet or e-commerce transactions.

Because we work with consumer information and other data and engage in marketing and advertising activities via telephone, email, and text messages, we are also subject to laws and regulations that address privacy, data protection and collection, storing, sharing, use, disclosure, retention, security, protection transfer and other processing of personal information and other data, including the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act of 2020, or collectively, the CCPA, and other state privacy laws, the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act, or CAN-SPAM Act, and the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, or TCPA. The burdens imposed by these and other laws and regulations currently in effect or that may be enacted, or new interpretation of existing laws and regulations, may require us to modify our data processing practices and policies and to incur substantial costs in order to comply. In addition, a number of states have enacted (and others are considering) broad data privacy laws that could affect our business. Although it remains unclear how these new privacy laws may be modified or interpreted, their effects could have an impact on our business, and may require us to modify our data use practices and policies and incur compliance-related costs and expenses. We take a variety of technical and organizational security measures and other measures to protect our data, including data pertaining to our consumers, employees, and business partners. Despite measures we put in place, we may be unable to anticipate or prevent unauthorized access to such data.

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We are affected by laws and regulations relating to the insurance industry, which is heavily regulated. While it is difficult to determine the impact of potential reforms on our future business, it is possible that such changes in industry regulation could affect our operations and demand for our platform. Because the laws and regulations governing the internet, privacy, data security, marketing, and insurance are constantly evolving and striving to keep pace with innovations in technology and media, it is possible that we may need to materially alter the way we conduct some parts of our business activities or be prohibited from conducting such activities altogether at some point in the future. See —“Item 1A. Risk Factors—Risks related to Laws and Regulations.”

Intellectual Property

We seek to protect our intellectual property through a combination of copyrights, trademarks, service marks, domain names, trade secret laws, confidentiality procedures and contractual restrictions.

We have a number of registered and unregistered trademarks. We own federal registrations for trademarks including EVERQUOTE, as well as multiple pending applications. We will pursue additional trademark registrations to the extent we believe doing so would be beneficial to our competitive position.

We are the registered holder of a variety of domestic and international domain names that include “EverQuote” and similar variations.

In addition to relying on the protection provided by these intellectual property rights, we enter into confidentiality and proprietary rights agreements with our employees, consultants, contractors and business partners. Our employees and contractors are also subject to invention assignment agreements. We further control the use of our proprietary technology and intellectual property through provisions in both our general and specific terms of use on our website.

Our Corporate Information

We were incorporated in Delaware on August 1, 2008, under the name AdHarmonics, Inc., and changed our name to EverQuote, Inc. on November 17, 2014. Our principal executive offices are located at 141 Portland Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, and our telephone number at that address is (855) 522-3444. Our website address is www.everquote.com. Our website and the information contained on, or that can be accessed through, the website will not be deemed to be incorporated by reference in, and are not considered part of, this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

Available Information

Our internet address is www.everquote.com. Our Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, including exhibits, proxy and information statements and amendments to those reports filed or furnished pursuant to Sections 13(a), 14, and 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, or the Exchange Act, are available through the “Investors” portion of our website free of charge as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file such material with, or furnish it to, the SEC. Information on our website is not part of this Annual Report on Form 10-K or any of our other securities filings unless specifically incorporated herein by reference. In addition, our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, may be accessed through the SEC’s Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis and Retrieval system at http://www.sec.gov. All statements made in any of our securities filings, including all forward-looking statements or information, are made as of the date of the document in which the statement is included, and we do not assume or undertake any obligation to update any of those statements or documents unless we are required to do so by law.