Competition

Competitors describe NerdWallet, Inc.'s market in their own filings and calls. These verified passages and visual pages show where their strategies meet, using source documents preserved in Sources.

LendingTree, Inc. (TREE)

The closest structural analogue to NerdWallet: a multi-vertical online comparison-shopping marketplace for mortgages, credit cards, personal and small business loans, deposits and insurance, monetised through match fees from financial partners. NerdWallet names LendingTree as an online competitor in its own 10-K.

LendingTree's 10-K positions its partner network breadth as the differentiator against narrower comparison-shopping marketplaces — the category NerdWallet also sits in.

LendingTree, Inc. (“LendingTree”, the “Company”, “we” or “us”) operates what we believe to be the leading online consumer platform that connects consumers with the choices they need to be confident in their financial decisions. Through multiple branded marketplaces, LendingTree empowers consumers to shop for financial services the same way they would shop for airline tickets or hotel stays, comparing multiple offers from a nationwide network of approximately 770 partners (which we refer to as “Network Partners”) in one simple search, and choose the option that best fits their financial needs. Services include mortgage loans, mortgage refinances, home equity loans and lines of credit, auto loans, credit cards, deposit accounts, personal loans, small business loans, insurance quotes and other related offerings. […] We believe our platform, consisting of a deep network of Network Partners across a broad array of financial products, differentiates us from other loan or insurance comparison-shopping marketplaces which may focus on fewer product offerings or partner with fewer service providers.

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Asked about the GenAI search environment, LendingTree's CEO describes industry-wide SEO turbulence and says he would not want to run a business dependent on legacy organic search — the traffic model NerdWallet has historically relied on.

Scott Peyree — Chief Executive Officer: SEO has been very turbulent in Q3, with shifts in traffic impacting the entire financial services industry. I wouldn’t want to be a company heavily reliant on legacy SEO traffic. I think it's fair to say that the era of free-ranking high on Google is coming to an end. On the brighter side, paid search traffic, which we excel at, is continuing to perform well and grow. So yes, it's a turbulent market and a transitional period where participation in legacy SEO still matters, but it's critical to focus on developing content and data openness for LLMs and AIOs.

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LendingTree's stated ambition is to be the top destination for shopping financial products, with a claim to the widest partner network among consumer finance shopping sites; the same remarks concede a legacy SEO decline it is offsetting with conversion gains.

Scott Peyree — President and Chief Executive Officer: Our marketing team has seen efficiency gains by utilizing AI-enabled technology to expedite design, ad testing, and funnel testing, resulting in a 17% year-over-year increase in overall conversions through our network in Q4, despite the challenges posed by legacy SEO decline. Our company’s guiding principle remains to be the top destination for shopping for financial products, and all our long-term initiatives are based on this goal. LendingTree has the widest network of financial partners compared to any consumer finance shopping site, enabling us to attract millions of visitors seeking the best deals.

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Intuit Inc. (Credit Karma) (INTU)

Its Credit Karma segment is the consumer personal-finance platform NerdWallet names first among online competitors: free credit scores and monitoring paired with personalised credit card, loan and insurance recommendations monetised through financial-institution partners. Exhibits below are drawn only from the Credit Karma / consumer platform discussion.

Intuit's stated view that Credit Karma took share of member originations in the two product categories that also anchor NerdWallet's revenue — personal loans and credit cards.

Sasan K. Goodarzi — Chief Executive Officer: Credit Karma had a strong quarter. In fiscal year 2025, we saw several point increases in share of member originations for personal loans and credit cards. We believe share gains continued in Q1 as members and partners find value in our platform. These strong results and the introduction of significant innovation with Done For You experiences, AI-powered local expertise, and faster access to money show the power of one consumer platform.

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Credit Karma's stated engaged-user base and cross-sell logic, answering an analyst on the durability of its share gains.

Sasan K. Goodarzi — Chief Executive Officer: Credit Karma is working because of all the innovation that we've done customer back and the integration with TurboTax. So if you really think about the 45 million monthly active users, the fact that they engage more than five times a month, and the fact that we now can help them with so many things more, compared to when we first bought Credit Karma when the member has the opportunity to understand what to do with their debt to get access to financial products like credit cards, personal loans, insurance.

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QuinStreet, Inc. (QNST)

A performance-marketing company whose financial services vertical spans the same product set NerdWallet monetises — auto insurance, credit cards, personal loans and banking — and which competes for the same client marketing budgets and the same high-intent consumer traffic.

QuinStreet's argument for why AI does not disintermediate performance marketing — that the risk sits with businesses doing simple aggregation or intermediation of commodity data and products, not with holders of proprietary data and client integrations.

Doug Valenti — Chief Executive Officer: Commodity data, commodity products, then they are certainly at risk from AI. But that is not what most successful software companies broadly define or certainly not what QuinStreet is or does. We at QuinStreet have literally billions of dollars of proprietary data. We have spent billions of dollars generating that data through media campaigns that are extraordinarily complex with permutations into the billions. […] We have proprietary integrations and access to data and that to that data that allows to continuously generate more of it, refresh it, and build on it. And we have proprietary technologies, including AI since 2008, as I mentioned.

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MediaAlpha, Inc. (MAX)

The largest insurance customer-acquisition marketplace, sitting on the demand side of the vertical that has become NerdWallet's biggest revenue driver. Financial comparison websites are the 'supply partners' whose traffic MediaAlpha monetises, so its disclosures size and describe the pool NerdWallet's insurance revenue is drawn from.

MediaAlpha's 10-K sizing of the insurance advertising market that funds the insurance vertical NerdWallet also serves.

Insurance is one of the largest industries in the United States, with attractive growth characteristics and market fundamentals. Insurance companies wrote over $3 trillion in premiums in 2024, growing at a 10% CAGR from 2018, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. Demand for insurance products is stable, due to, in many instances, coverage being mandated by law (for example, auto insurance) or lenders (for example, homeowners insurance) or federally subsidized (for example, Medicare Advantage plans). The insurance industry as a whole is highly competitive and invests heavily in customer acquisition. According to William Blair, advertising spend by P&C insurance carriers in the U.S. is expected to reach approximately $14 billion in 2026, growing at a 10% CAGR from 2024 levels. We expect digital insurance advertising spend to grow at double digit rates annually over the next few years.

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MediaAlpha's stated carrier penetration and referral volume — the scale benchmark in insurance customer acquisition.

For the year ended December 31, 2025, of the top 20 largest auto insurance carriers by customer acquisition spend in 2024, according to Dowling & Partners’ Advertising study, 16 were Demand Partners on our platform. Of these carriers, half were also Supply Partners in our ecosystem. During 2025, consumers shopping for insurance products through the websites of our diversified group of Supply Partners and our proprietary websites drove an average of 11.8 million Consumer Referrals on our platform each month.

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Answering an analyst on how LLMs reshape insurance shopping, MediaAlpha's CEO gives a read on how much traffic its comparison-site supply partners — the peer set NerdWallet belongs to — are currently sourcing from LLMs, and flags that not all of them will adapt.

Steve Yi — Chief Executive Officer: I see either possibilities happening. I think, we think it's more likely that it's more of the latter, that the LLMs become a traffic source for most of our existing supply partners. I mean, certainly, some of our supply partners may not make the adjustment and are not able to acquire traffic in an efficient way from the LLMs. But once the LLMs layer on an advertising model, we think that could be a tremendous tailwind for our supply partners as that introduces an incremental advertising traffic acquisition source for them. […] I think anecdotally, our supply partners are telling us that somewhere in the mid- to high single digits of their traffic is coming from the LLMs, and this is in the early stages. I think as you've seen a couple of our supply partners have introduced apps for the LLMs.

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EverQuote, Inc. (EVER)

A pure-play online insurance marketplace competing for the same insurer advertising budgets and the same insurance-shopping consumers, in the vertical that now drives most of NerdWallet's revenue growth. Its 10-K places 'finance and credit savings sites' — NerdWallet's category — in its competitive set.

EverQuote's 10-K sizing of P&C insurance distribution spend, including the digital slice that online marketplaces compete for.

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. […] 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.

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EverQuote's 10-K competitive set for consumer traffic includes 'finance and credit savings sites', the category NerdWallet occupies.

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.

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Asked about rivals launching apps inside ChatGPT, EverQuote's CEO gives his read on how little traffic those integrations currently carry, and why paid advertising inside LLMs matters more to him than app placement.

Jayme Mendal — Chief Executive Officer: Regarding LLMs and app integrations, I would put that under the umbrella of technical integrations. We've been testing in these platforms for a while and have built several apps. We have not pushed anything to production yet. There are a number of apps in the insurance category in ChatGPT; many are similar — they take a web form experience and apply a lightweight conversational front end before spinning the consumer back to a web-based quoting and binding experience. There's a lot of friction to actually access these apps — you need to install or grant permissions — so our sense is very little actual traffic is flowing through those right now. […] One is paid advertising — ChatGPT and other LLM platforms opening up to paid ads. We're among the largest paid advertisers in insurance.

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Zillow Group, Inc. (ZG)

Named by NerdWallet as an online marketplace competitor. The overlap is the mortgage funnel: Zillow runs both a lender marketplace and its own direct originator, the same dual structure NerdWallet created when it added the NDL mortgage brokerage alongside its mortgage comparison marketplace. Exhibits below cover the mortgage and consumer-traffic discussion only, not rentals or agent software.

Zillow's 10-K describes the same two-track mortgage model NerdWallet now runs — a lender marketplace alongside a directly owned originator.

For Borrowers. We provide buyers with multiple ways to pursue mortgage financing for their transaction. We provide the option to finance directly with Zillow Home Loans or to connect with our mortgage partners through our mortgage marketplace for both purchase and refinance opportunities. Zillow Home Loans, which is currently available in 49 states and the District of Columbia, originates mortgage loans and then generally sells the loans on the secondary market. Throughout 2025, Zillow Home Loans had double digit customer adoption rates across our Enhanced Markets.

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Competition

LendingTree, Inc. (TREE)

Intuit Inc. (Credit Karma) (INTU)

QuinStreet, Inc. (QNST)

MediaAlpha, Inc. (MAX)

EverQuote, Inc. (EVER)

Zillow Group, Inc. (ZG)

More peer documents