Chapter 2

Insurance Concentration

Almost all of NerdWallet's recent growth came from one vertical. Insurance was 8% of revenue in 2023 and 34% in 2025, and it supplied $235.8 million of the $237.2 million by which total revenue rose over those two years — strip it out and the rest of the company was flat. That growth rode an auto-insurance carrier-budget upcycle shared with pure-play peers, and it is concentrated: one customer was 26% of 2025 revenue. In March 2026 the concentration bit.

The vertical that carried the company

The revenue NerdWallet added between 2023 and 2025 is, to a rounding error, the insurance line. Insurance grew from $45.0 million to $280.8 million — a 6.2-fold increase [1]. Over the same span credit cards fell $76.3 million and the other three categories, netted together, moved by less than $80 million combined. The arithmetic leaves insurance responsible for 99% of the two-year revenue gain, and the rest of the business essentially flat.

Source: FY2025 Form 10-K, Note 2 Revenue disaggregation; "ex-insurance" derived by subtraction [2].

Sources: FY2025 Form 10-K, Note 2 Revenue [3] and Concentrations of Credit Risk [4].

Insurance revenue is earned mostly per click, and covers consumer auto, life and pet products; the 2024–25 surge was specifically auto [5]. Management attributes the increase in each of the last two years to the same cause. Insurance rose $146.6 million, or 326%, in 2024 "primarily driven by a strong increase in auto insurance products revenue as carriers expanded budgets" [6], and a further $89.2 million, or 47%, in 2025 for the same reason [7]. The driver named in the filings is not a NerdWallet product improvement; it is carrier spending.

Borrowed from the cycle

That carrier spending moves in a cycle, and the two public companies that live entirely inside it document its shape. Auto-insurance carriers cut customer-acquisition budgets sharply in 2022 and 2023 — EverQuote attributes the pullback to "deteriorating underwriting performance, a rise in claims, inflation, and inadequate policy premiums" — then reopened them in 2024 and 2025 [8]. MediaAlpha frames the same pattern in industry terms: the property-and-casualty industry ran underwriting losses from 2021 through 2023 on automobile repair-cost inflation, "it has recovered strongly during 2024 and 2025" [9], and it describes the mechanism plainly — "soft" markets when loss ratios are low and carriers spend to acquire customers, "hard" markets when loss ratios are high and they cut acquisition spending until they can raise premiums [10].

Indexed to the 2023 trough, all three revenue lines move together: the incumbents fell into 2023 as NerdWallet's insurance line was still a rounding error, and all three then surged through 2024–25 on the same carrier-budget reopening.

Sources: NerdWallet insurance revenue, FY2025 10-K [11]; EverQuote total revenue [12] and MediaAlpha total revenue [13], reported financials FY2022–FY2025.

The peers' own accounts swung with the cycle. EverQuote went from a $51.3 million net loss in 2023 to $99.3 million of net income in 2025; MediaAlpha from a $40.4 million loss to $25.6 million of profit. NerdWallet's advantage is that it entered this upswing already profitable and far less exposed — insurance is 34% of its revenue, against roughly 90% for both pure-plays [14] [15]. But the growth that lifted NerdWallet's whole story came from the same external switch, and the incumbents warn it can flip: EverQuote notes that even after the recovery "a number of our top carrier customers remain below their peak historical spend" [16], and MediaAlpha flags a live 2026 trigger — new tariffs on imported automobiles and parts could raise claim costs and loss ratios and bring back the hard-market conditions that cut carrier spending [17].

The concentration inside the vertical

NerdWallet's exposure is narrower than the vertical's 34% share suggests, because the vertical itself leans on a few buyers. The filings disclose a single-customer ratchet: one customer was 26% of total revenue in 2025, up from a largest customer of 22% in 2024 and of 13% in 2023 [18]. The 10-K does not name that customer. But its size is the tell: at 26% of $836.6 million it is about $217 million, and the only category large enough to hold it is insurance, at $280.8 million. Read that way — and management's own remarks point the same direction — one auto-insurance carrier is roughly three-quarters of the insurance line, and close to a quarter of the entire company.

Source: FY2025 Form 10-K, Concentrations of Credit Risk [19] and Note 2 Revenue [20].

Management confirmed the shape of the risk on the first-quarter 2026 call, and did so in the same breath as the first sign it was materializing. Chen: "One of our large carriers pulled back in March, and we have a lot of concentration towards a few carriers currently and a few channels," adding that even after growing the business several-fold "we are still a relatively new player in this market and have a pretty high concentration" [21]. The effect was not trivial: monetization from that partner "started running below our expectations, which impacted our Q1 results and is expected to have a greater impact in Q2" [22]. The company assumes in its guidance that it cannot offset the insurance weakness for the full year [23].

What management is doing about it

The response is a deliberate diversification of the insurance vertical, and it is being funded now. NerdWallet is deepening technology integrations with additional auto carriers, standing up phone-based referrals to agent-centric carriers, and building a branded agency, NerdWallet Insurance Experts, to add calls and leads alongside its core click product [24]. Chen describes this as a "more diversified and resilient base," and on the follow-up was explicit that it is a multi-quarter build with "a slower ramp" and real incremental cost [25]. That the company is spending to widen its carrier base is the clearest confirmation that the concentration is real; it is also the reason the low end of full-year operating-income guidance was cut.

The counter-case is that the backdrop still favors the vertical. Chen called the macro outlook for auto-insurance customer-acquisition spend "strong" [26], and MediaAlpha sees the industry's underwriting recovery as a multi-year tailwind [27]. If carrier budgets keep climbing and NerdWallet adds carriers faster than any one pulls back, the concentration falls while the vertical still grows. The evidence points the other way for now: one carrier is already a quarter of the company, that carrier cut spend in March, the disclosure that would let an outsider track carrier mix was retired from Q1 2026, and the diversification is a slow build against a fast risk. What would change the read is the single-customer ratio falling in the next two 10-Ks while insurance revenue holds — new carriers replacing old — rather than the vertical's growth and its concentration remaining the same number.