Great. Thank you all for joining this morning. Good morning, everyone. I'm Maria Ripps, Internet Analyst here at Canaccord Genuity, and it's my pleasure to introduce Pat Thompson, MediaAlpha CFO, and Tigran Sinanyan, VP of Finance. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us today. With that, let's get started. Great. Thanks, Maria. Thanks for having us, Maria. So maybe we can start with a broader sort of industry backdrop. Investors are weighing a few important themes right now, including a soft market cycle, AI risks and benefits, and ongoing macro uncertainty. How would you describe the environment today, and how is MediaAlpha navigating these dynamics? Yeah. I think the industry backdrop that we have right now is very good. It's a very good position. Broadly speaking, I'll probably oversimplify things here, but every auto insurance carrier is profitable right now. I'm sure if you canvassed, you could find one of the top 100 that isn't, but pretty much everybody is making money. Carriers are increasingly pivoting from being in a situation where they're focused on getting underwriting results where they need them to be. So they've kind of pivoted from that to looking for growth. As you look over the last four, five, six years, the lion's share of industry growth has gone to one or two players in the industry. A lot of the other players are now, I think, answering questions from investors or from the boardroom of, "How are you going to grow? You need to grow." That plays very much to our strengths of being a performance marketing channel that's very measurable and allows carriers to focus on the customer segments, cohorts, and characteristics where they are most likely to win. We really like where we're positioned right now. We think that we've got the wind at our back, and we should continue to do that for the years to come. So maybe just expanding a little bit on what you just talked about as it relates to auto and the softer market cycle, how long do the cycles typically last? And where are current carrier acquisition spend today versus compared to prior soft market peaks? Maria, I'll take that one. I think you're right to point out where we are in the cycle, which is firmly kind of in a soft market, right. That's where carriers are competing aggressively for new customer acquisition. I'd say that historically, these are multi-year cycles. We're a couple of years into a recovery from a generationally hard market in 2022- 2023. But as you look back, the leading indicator here of combined ratio and carrier profitability, and we sit in a really good spot as an acquisition, right. With everyone seeing combined ratio at or near peak levels of profitability. And so even when the market starts to harden, what we've seen in the past, and I'll point to 2006 and 2016, you see ad spend growth maybe moderate a little bit, decline in the low to mid-single digits. And from there you have years of equilibrium where ad spend continues to kind of grow at a modest rate. And so where we are today is a place where we see a broadening of demand and a lot of carriers really turning to growth and trying to drive policy in force. And it's coming from everyone outside of the top two, right. And so that, I think, signals to us that we're in a good spot in the cycle. We expect that to be a good multi-year run, right. Rather than a softening that's led by just one or two carriers. Maybe expand a little bit on what you just said, which is broadening sort of recovery. Is it largely coming from larger carriers, smaller carriers? Do carriers that are already on the platform spending more? What are you seeing? We're seeing the larger carriers continue to focus on growth, and highly efficient growth. What we're seeing is an acceleration from the field, right. Everyone other than the top two really stepping on the gas and starting to catch up, right. And so it's mostly the, I won't call them new entrants because we've worked with these carriers for years. They just hadn't stepped up the level of investment in our channel the way they have here in 2026. I think one stat that we put out there was everyone outside of the top two, what we've seen from carriers three, four, and five, is a 4x growth year-over-year, first half 2026 over 2025 in terms of ad spend growth. The top two continue to grow at double-digit rates, but it's really that field catching up. That's a really good sign for us. Got it. On your Q2 call last week, you framed sort of the gating factor for some of these carriers is to spend more as capability with many still sort of new to direct-to-consumer and performance-based channels. Maybe talk about some of your initiatives to help to move some of these carriers along the adoption curve. Yeah. I think the agent-based carriers are a big opportunity for us, and as you look at the league table of auto insurers, State Farm is captive agent-based, the number two carrier. Allstate, who's number four, has captive agents being a meaningful portion of their distribution. As you go down the league table, there's American Family, Farmers, others that also focus on that. As we look at the opportunity with those, we're thinking really about meeting them where they're at. In the near term, that could be things like partnering with major carriers to create a lead marketplace. We did it with one of the major carriers. What that is us partnering with them to make leads available to their agents, including exclusive leads. That is an opportunity for us to bring technology and partnership, which are two of our core capabilities to bear to ultimately help those agents acquire online shoppers. The other longer-term opportunity for us is helping these agent-based carriers really go direct-to-consumer. State Farm would be a good example of this, which is State Farm, up until very, very recently, you could not buy a policy on statefarm.com. Clearly, they are investing there. Clearly, that is going to become a more important part of their distribution base, just given demographics and consumer preference. As they look to move increasingly online with customer acquisition, that plays to just our natural business strength. We are prepared to help them as they make that transition, and we are really excited about the agent-based opportunity because it has been a nice growth lever for us and one that we expect to continue going forward. Got it. I guess as carrier participation broadens, you are also seeing more favorable mix shift towards the higher margin open marketplace. For investors that are less familiar with MediaAlpha's model, can you maybe refresh us on the key dynamics impacting the mix of open versus private marketplace transactions and what that means for your P&L? Sure. I'll take this one. We've got two primary deployment models. One is the open marketplace, and one is the private. I'll start with just a little bit of a definition on each. With the open marketplace, that's carriers bidding on consumer inventory through our platform across hundreds of publishers and supply sources that we work with. They're leveraging our team, our analytics capabilities, our managed service capabilities, to really deploy that spend efficiently, at a high ROI. So they're using our bidding models, right. They're relying on us to really step into their shoes and help them drive efficient spend. There, the ad spend is recognized as our GAAP revenue. Our revenue share to our supply partners is the cost of goods. Our contribution dollars is basically our gross profit, or variable marketing margin, as others call it. We do a lot more, right. We take a consultative, hands-on approach, and we take more margin there. In the private marketplace, we design that as a deployment where at-scale partners on the supply side, and very sophisticated buyers on the demand side can work together but still leverage our technology to do the ad serving, tracking, reporting, optimization, and all of that. But really, the supply partner steps into our shoes and does all of that account management work with the demand partner. Our take rate there is lower. The ad spend, we recognize as transaction value. Our GAAP revenue is the fee that we charge for use of our platform. Really that revenue from private marketplace drops down to the contribution line, really one-to-one. As we're seeing this broadening of demand, you can imagine it's coming from carriers that don't have that level of sophistication. Right. They are ramping entrants, so they're leveraging our teams, our capabilities to manage that spend, so a lot of it, or most of it, is coming through the open marketplace. So you do see a favorable mix shift to open marketplace— Yeah. —which does have higher— Yep. —overall margin. That's great. So maybe, given the ongoing macro uncertainty, including tariff and gas-related headwinds, maybe talk about what are you seeing in terms of carrier sentiment today, and what are you hearing from carriers as they plan their spending for the second half of the year? I think we see continued attention on driving policy growth. I would say from a tariff perspective, miles driven, gas prices, we haven't heard anything from carriers about that impacting profitability, really. What's really driving that for them is how much they want to invest in new policy growth and customer acquisition. I'd say that, again, the carriers three and on continue to look at this channel, which is highly measurable, as a growth lever for them. We see continued investment, continued ramp in velocity in spend from the field. Yeah. Maybe just to throw an additional stat out on that, which is we've pretty consistently over a number of quarters have had 2%-10% of revenue customers. For Q2, we just announced having a third. We've got a fourth customer that's not far off that threshold. From a customer diversification standpoint, we feel like we're in the best position we've been in in a long time. The stat Tigran threw out earlier of carriers three, four, and five are growing 300% year-over-year. Yeah. We feel like the wind is definitely blowing in the right direction. Yeah. That's great. Let's talk about outside of auto. You were in the healthcare vertical. You largely exited that vertical, but maybe just talk about what's out there in terms of verticals and what would be interesting to MediaAlpha going forward. Yeah. I think Medicare remains an interesting opportunity, a long-term opportunity, with premium dollars that are actually bigger than auto, at $400+ billion. Today, the carriers are challenged a little bit from a margin perspective, so we continue to watch that space and have relationships in place to scale when the opportunity's right. Today, I think you're right, our guide is about 1% of revenue in non-seasonal peaks, maybe 2%-3% in Q4 during annual enrollment periods and open enrollment periods. I'd say that broadly, our platform is uniquely positioned to help publishers and advertisers where there's high consideration, high-ticket products being sold in the end markets, and where every consumer search comes with a lot of structured data. That's where the transparency and granularity that we offer our partners can really come to play and bring efficiency to bear. Right. We like our position in P&C. We think there are some interesting opportunities in adjacent verticals like commercial. But those are all in the early stages of exploration from both an organic build perspective and M&A and just canvassing what is out there. Got it. Excuse me. I want to switch gears and talk about AI, but more so on the traffic side. With platforms like ChatGPT becoming more relevant in consumer discovery and beginning to expand advertising opportunities, how are you thinking about the potential to impact consumer traffic source for your marketplace? Yeah, I think we are in the very early days of AI search today. We are seeing it grow at a pretty quick clip, and we are hearing from some of our publishers that LLM traffic now exceeds what they are getting from organic or SEO. One of the —two positive things about it, one is that the quality that they are seeing and we are seeing from that traffic is very, very good. A number of publishers have told us that the quality of that traffic is even better than they typically see in the organic channel. Secondly, to kind of building on what Tigran just talked about, the thing that is really exciting for us over the long term is the structured data component of AI. Which is, an LLM over time will learn a tremendous amount about you, and thus they will be able to potentially pass that either to our publishers or directly to us if they become a publisher. That piece is very, very exciting. You can imagine in the future, searching for insurance on an LLM, and they might only need to ask you two or three questions to actually know everything they need to know and ultimately start to really pass you along to whoever can best meet your needs. As we think about our role in that ecosystem, our role is one of being connectivity infrastructure between publishers and carriers. We've got the schema of data that is used for all of that. We've got a tremendous shopper database. We've got bids from every carrier on every customer, so we understand roughly how customers are valued. Over time, we're very excited about both the quality of traffic that they'll deliver to publishers and ultimately, to have partnerships with the ChatGPTs, the Gemini, the Claude, the Grok, the Perplexity of the world. We are very, very excited about it, and we think it's ultimately going to be a tailwind. Are you working with other AI platforms outside of ChatGPT in terms of developing these kind of relationships? I would say we're in the experimentation stage in terms of advertising for our own account. Our business is primarily, we're overwhelmingly a partnership business where we work with publishers but we do a little bit of our own media, and so we're experimenting with that. I think it is a longer-term opportunity just given where the LLMs are at in terms of monetization. Which is, they're in the early days of adopting an ad model, and I think— Right. —the stat I saw is that 20% of ChatGPT users have seen an ad in the last month, up from 1%, as opposed to Google, where it is 100% of searches see an ad. Right. They are in the early days of that transition to an ad model, then they will have to identify insurance as being an attractive vertical to go deeper in. We think we are a little bit away from that, but we are very excited for that opportunity. Got it. That makes sense. Let us switch gears here and talk about your demand and supply partners. One of the unique aspects of your two-sided marketplace is the ability for demand partners to also function as supply partners. Tigran, we talked about this for years and years and years. How does the strategy strengthen your relationship with carriers? Approximately what portion of your partners are currently active on both sides of the marketplace? Yeah. Maria, I think the way it strengthens our relationships is once a partner is integrated on both sides, it really changes how they view MediaAlpha holistically, right. The integrations get deeper. They view this monetization channel, right, as an opportunity to be ad funding, r ight. It's one of the levers that they have for growth. As they monetize this, I'll call non-converting consumer base, so it's getting quotes, that allows them to go out and spend more and acquire new customers and just improve their overall marketing mix efficiency. It changes things from us being an acquisition channel to being a much more integrated partner with them. That's really how we started the business, right. We started as an owned and operated website, but the big pivot to being MediaAlpha was bringing on a carrier as a supply partner, and that was Esurance. I think we're committed to continuing to develop those relationships. In terms of numbers, I'd say the number of partners that sit on both sides has been relatively stable. Really, the dollars will grow and will continue to grow with how much they invest in ad spend going forward. I'd say if it's a broker, if it's a carrier, the overwhelming majority of those folks do sit on both sides of our marketplace as both buyers and sellers. Mm-hmm. Interesting. Let's talk about financials before we wrap up. You guided both Q3 revenue and profitability above the street, expecting continued momentum. What are some of the key considerations embedded in the range, whether it is on the carrier health, macro volatility, or product-driven momentum? Yeah. I would say, philosophically, when it comes to guidance, we guide to what we have a high degree of confidence in. It is momentum-based, based on known and likely items, and I think we have a good track record of achieving or beating the quarterly guidance. We base it on what we are seeing and what we are hearing from carriers. With carriers, we tend to have really good visibility into this month. You get decent visibility into the month after, and the further out you go, it gets a little bit harder to know, is it going to be up a little bit or flat or down a little bit? I think we are in a spot right now where we talked about it on the public earnings call that the end of June was really good, and July was good when we were in the run-up to earnings. That was the big driver for the good guidance for Q3. I think we have seen really nice sequential performance for 10 or 11 quarters now, and as we talked about in the beginning of the call, we think the market is in a good spot. We think our value proposition to publishers and carriers is the strongest it has ever been and continuing to strengthen. We think that we are set up for a good remainder of 2026 and a really nice 2027 and beyond. Well, related to that, I know you are not guiding to next year, but how should we think about key growth variables next year, given all the momentum that you are seeing? Yeah. I think the couple things I would tell folks to think about, one is that broadening of demand that Tigran in particular has talked about and I've talked a little bit about of we historically were very top-heavy in terms of demand, and we're seeing that broaden out, and the opportunity over time is for our demand to look quite a bit more like the league table for auto insurers. That's been moving in the right direction, and that's a trend that we would expect to continue. The other thing I would just encourage folks to look at is the comps, basically. Okay. As we go through the year, the comps will get a little bit harder as we continue to put up sequential growth. But it is too early for us to put out 2027 guidance, but we do feel like it should be a good year and another year of record results. Great. The only thing I'd add to that is, we've talked about the top two carriers, and we represent north of 10% of their marketing mix, right. Ad spend deployed on our channel. When you look at everyone outside of those top two, it's in the mid to low- single digits. And so, we should become a more meaningful and more representative share of their overall marketing mix over time. We're not guiding to it in any quarter or near-term— Yep. —kind of year. I think again, that that market dynamic really supports the growth that we expect to see. Got it, got it. That's great. We have a minute or so left. I just want to see if we have any questions from the audience. Yeah, go ahead. Where people aren't spending, where are they spending? Yeah, I can take that, which is, broadly speaking, I think carriers have three buckets of distribution spend. The biggest bucket in aggregate for carriers is going to be on commissions. As you think of agent-based carriers, that's the lion's share of what they do. For every dollar of commissions, there's about $0.50 of working marketing spend. That working marketing spend that is spent, the majority of that is going to be on brand spend. I remember when I was interviewing to join MediaAlpha five years ago, Steve, our CEO, talked about how big the marketing opportunity was. I happened to watch a football game right after my conversation with him. Literally every commercial break, you'd see an ad for one of the major auto insurers. That's the biggest bucket. Online advertising is also an increasingly meaningful part of the mix. For every dollar of commissions, there's $0.50 of marketing. Of that $0.50, 40% of it, or $0.20, is online marketing. We are the biggest online platform for insurance-specific advertising. We've got a couple of public peers, and obviously there's Google and other channels on there. We've seen our share consistently grow over time, and we really think that is testament to what we've built, the transparency of the marketplace, and the results that our carrier partners have seen. [inaudible] insurers' volume margin very profitable right now and the market's soft. How do those two things work together? I would've thought it would be opposite. Pricing's soft, profitability's not going to be [inaudible]. Yeah. In the insurance space, a soft market is a good thing. [inaudible]. Yeah. [inaudible]. Yeah, exactly. I think soft markets are characterized by strong profitability and a focus on growth. Carriers, 2024 and 2025 was, I think, one of the best years on record for auto insurance profitability. 2026 should be probably not quite as good, but still very good. As carriers pivot to growth, they tend to do two things. One is lean in on marketing spend to try to acquire the customers. Secondly, to selectively focus on rate reductions or minimal rate increases where it makes sense. We are seeing both of those things happen, and both of those are good for us. Marketing spend obviously directly translates to the P&L. Rate decreases tend to spur shopping activity, which is good for us. [inaudible]. Yeah, and I would say it is modest price declines, if anything. And there is still natural inflation in claims cost and everything. So I would not necessarily read it as carriers are cutting price willy-nilly. It is more, "Hey, married homeowners in Greater Boston are attractive. We are going to cut rates 2% there." And so it is much more targeted and surgical. All right. That was a great discussion. I think we are out of time. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us today, and thank you all for coming. Yeah. Thank you, Maria, and thank you, everybody.