Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to LendingTree Incorporated's third quarter 2026 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Andrew Wessel, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Thank you, James. Hello to everyone joining us on the call to discuss our third quarter 2026 financial results. On with us are Scott Peyree, President and CEO, and Jason Bengel, CFO. This afternoon, we posted a detailed letter to shareholders and our investor presentation on our investor relations website. For the purposes of today's discussion, we will assume that listeners have gone through those materials, and we will focus on Q&A. But before I hand the call over to Scott for his remarks, I remind everyone that during this call, we may discuss our expectations for future performance. Any forward-looking statements that we make are subject to risks and uncertainties, and our actual results could differ materially from the views expressed today. Many, but not all, of those risks we face are described in our periodic reports filed with the SEC. We will also discuss a variety of non-GAAP measures on the call, and I refer you to today's press release and shareholder letter, both available on our website, for the comparable GAAP definitions and full reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to GAAP. With that, Scott, please go ahead. Thank you, Andrew. Jason and I have a few opening comments before we get into Q&A. First off, we are very excited to provide strong financial results in Q3 that handily beat guidance we put out, as well as our updated guidance for the full year assumes adjusted EBITDA growth by 14% at the midpoint, despite ongoing headwinds in the mortgage business. This result highlights the durability of our diversified business model. To hit very briefly on each of our main businesses, starting with insurance, the property and casualty industry cycle remains steady and very strong. We have multiple clients growing very quickly with us. The new bidding platform with our largest client that we were integrating with at the end of Q2 and beginning of Q3 went very well and rolled out faster than we fully expected to and provided benefit to our business there throughout the remainder of the quarter. On the consumer side, as we expected and communicated in the Q2 earnings calls, Q2 was a trough in the performance of the small business lending, and we did see strong sequential growth. We are still on the path to getting back to our all-time records of Q4 of last year and Q1 of this year, but we are feeling that the industry is in a much better position, and we are tracking to continued growth. As a matter of fact, September and October were our two best SMB concierge sales months since January of this year. We definitely think it is heading in the right trajectory. Just on the consumer lending side in general, from a client perspective, we are seeing strong lender performance. Credit availability remains very strong. Loan performance remains good. Unemployment rate, which is a big leading indicator a lot of the lenders look at, remains very low. Personal loans and the other consumer lending areas remain in a strong and healthy place. On the home side, long-term interest rates and overall have definitely gone in the wrong direction this year, which has provided some headwinds. That said, even in those headwinds, we provided strong year-over-year growth in both revenue and VMD. We are very proud of that. We feel like we are taking market share there. We feel like a number of the investments there we have done to grow consumer traffic have been effective. There still is very strong demand from clients in that space. It is really a matter of finding those qualified consumers that are looking for the loans. But as we mentioned in the letter, home equity and HELOC have become a major part of that business, and that business is much less interest rate sensitive than purchase or refinance mortgage. We believe heading into next year; we can continue to see growth in the home equity side of that business. On the North Star strategy, execution continued and stayed strong. Just to remind everyone, our big focus is on return customers, referred customers, and login user growth. On the login user side, we have been building and rolling out a number of tools we are excited about, debt management tools, AI-driven recommendations, scenario tools analysis. We are really looking forward to some of the things we will be rolling out over the next few quarters, and we have got a long list of features that we think will create a very sticky login user base over the long run that will provide return consumers that we can proactively provide our financial and insurance product offering to, without paying for those consumers to come through every time. On just the consumer experience, the shopping experience, the Susie experience, as we call it internally, which is just to transform and dramatically improve the Susie experience, we are very happy with improvements we are making there. For example, voice and text AI, we are continuing to roll out in beta form on multiple fronts where we are bringing AI in to handle a lot of the shopping process on behalf of the consumer until they are closer to application-ready process before we hand them off to the client. We are seeing lots of positive signs on multiple fronts there, really looking to more rapidly and aggressively roll that out as we head into 2027. AI overviews that we are providing, mainly to our personal loans customers right now. We have rolled it out from just our login users to now all of our branded LendingTree.com users. We are looking to roll out new versions of it for personal loans, that are even better and improved on helping when you are sitting on 30 to 50 offers, helping you understand which offers you should select based off of your personal situation. We are seeing a lot of engagement from the consumers there. Our plan is, as we get into 2027, is too early in 2027 to have versions of AI overviews for every product we are offering to the consumers coming through our website. Moving on, just to hit briefly on, there has been a lot of conversations that I have had, and I am sure questions will come up here, so I will just preemptively talk about it a little bit, is just the AI threat, mainly the LLM threat to our business and our competitors' business, versus maybe the reality we are all seeing right now. I will start with, we have, as we have looked at it, and all the consumers out there, we have the ability to generate way higher increases in traffic through social business development and publishers than we have the threat of losing traffic to LLMs, and for any of the near midterm. As we look at the marketplaces out there is just, we are under-indexed in a lot of those categories. We have had a lot of success this year growing those categories. We are actively investing heavier to grow at a faster rate in those categories. When you look at the LLMs, I mean, they have been growing. They are taking a bigger share, but an analysis I was given a few months ago, if you really look at the overall bucket, and if you include search with LLMs as just like a pie of consumers, all of the LLMs added up together are 5% of the search bucket. As we have seen, like, which gets a lot of media, like when new items come out, like Muse, what we are seeing is they are taking share away from the other LLMs, much more so than they are taking share away from like a Google AI overview search result. So, it is still growing. We are still actively involved. We have got a lot of resources committed to it, whether it is like we are building apps for the LLMs, whether we are making our content available for LLMs to access, whether we are advertising on the LLMs. But I think it's just fair to set the precedent that we don't expect any sort of massive growth in traffic from the LLMs anytime in the near future, nor do we expect any major loss of traffic we're getting from other sources to the LLMs anytime in the near future. We're excited about the growth we know we can achieve from other areas where consumers are every day in shopping for products that we're offering. To add to that, LendingTree's carrier and lender network is a big structural moat. We have 700 plus carriers and lenders in our network. Roughly half to three-quarters of these only quote via backend API access, not open online quoting. This whole concept of an LLM agent just going and filling out forms on behalf of the consumer, yeah, that's true to some extent, but it's very limited in most of the industries we're in where they could actually get a very good and quality set of comparison quotes. That's where we provide huge advantage. We feel that we can be an extremely useful platform in this world, not just from the breadth of offerings, but also from a compute standpoint with the agents, to be a go-to source for the financial product quoting via AI agents. For example, why would an LLM agent Muse burn compute hitting 20 separate personal loan sites when they could just come to our site and get those same 20 quotes by filling out one form through us? Even when I say filling out a form, the protocols of the agents working together, it's not even really the need to fill out a form. They're just communicating with our specialty agent that can provide that on their behalf, our specialty agents that can be on the phone on behalf to get other quotes that you can only get over the phone. We're going to be building a lot of this stuff that the big LLMs just simply aren't going to put the attention to over any time in the near future. Just to round that out, I mean, I would say we are very excited about the agentic AI capabilities we're building to both improve the current shopping experience and transform the shopping experience in general. Whether its consumers using our web-based platforms to shop, whether it's LLMs or other agentic AIs accessing our specialty AI agents to shop, or whether it's logged in members that get the benefit of our agentic AI doing secret shopping, interactively preparing updated offers in real time on their behalf. We're more confident by the day that we can provide huge value to the consumer in the age of AI. With that said, before passing over to Jason to comment on the bigger picture of financial performance, I just want to reiterate our excitement about the growth we see in the head of us. The North Star is starting to really show real results in our consumers. We've done a lot of testing throughout 2026 of millions of different things of how we can use AI and agentic AI to transform the shopping experience. We feel like we've identified a number of things that can be used across all of the industries we operate in now. We will be really investing heavily in rolling that all out on a broad macro basis in 2027 and beyond. With that, Jason, go ahead. Thanks, Scott. I think it is useful just to take a step back. When you look at the midpoint of our guide versus 2023, you are looking at a 25% EBITDA CAGR. You are looking at expenses with a 3% CAGR, in line with inflation, essentially. You are looking at net leverage moving from 5.3 to 1.7. We have made tremendous progress over the last few years. Looking at 2026, we have had some headwinds in 2026, right? We are still growing EBITDA well into double digits, 14% when you are looking at the midpoint of the guide. That is because we have a diversified portfolio, like Scott alluded to. You are looking at within 2026 expenses growing around 3% at the midpoint. That is the result of discipline and a focus on driving internal efficiencies with the use of AI. We expect all that to continue into 2027. I think what is also interesting is when you look at our cash flow, look at our Q3 LTM cash flow, free cash flow, excluding litigation, it is $100 million. That is a lot of cash available to return to shareholders. Coming back to the diversified business point, insurance is performing extremely well. We expect it to continue to perform extremely well. Home is in a difficult environment. Mortgage is hard right now. When you look at that segment, you look at sort of the mid-cycle earnings and just averaging the peak and the trough of home, that is about $50 million of VMD higher than where we are today. Majority of that would drop to EBITDA. We just cannot really get confident that is going to happen soon, but there is a massive potential there for that segment, because we have a diversified strong business with a great lender network. This quarter, we paid down $60 million of debt. We saved $5 million in interest expense, bringing our gross debt down to $336 million, approaching pretty close to our $200 million longer-term goal. You will see in our financials, we did take a non-cash goodwill impairment of $99 million in home and consumer. That is really involving testing for impairment where we had to consider our market cap on and around September 30th. That resulted in the charge. This does not reflect a change in our expectations for these segments, but it does reflect a market cap that implies a free cash flow yield, ex litigation, north of 25%. We see the attractiveness in these numbers. We see the attractiveness and the upside on our stock. In Q4, we are going to be buying back stock, and we are going to continue paying down debt. With that, I will hand it over to the operator for Q&A. Thank you. At this time, we will conduct the question-and-answer session. To ask a question, you will need to press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from the line of Jed Kelly from Oppenheimer & Co. Jed, your line is now open. Hey, great. Thanks for taking my question. Just diving into insurance, I think one of your competitors last night said they expect a soft market cycle or higher favorable profitability cycle to continue potentially into 2028, 2029. Are you seeing the same thing, and do you just have a good multi-year visibility into insurance over the next couple years? Thanks. Yeah. Thanks for the question, Jed. I would generally agree with that sentiment you heard yesterday, and it is a very stable industry at this point in the game. I would say there is probably long-term. It is easier to look out long-term and project continued long-term growth today than almost has ever been. Not that there cannot be a big turn where inflation goes way up again, which could affect the insurance companies, or they start giving some rate back to the consumers, which affects their profitability. Yeah, I think the industry is more stable now than it has been in a long, long time. It is very profitable in general. We are seeing, and I am sure not just us, our competitors as well, are just seeing more players get more aggressive with budget, which is very good for a marketplace business like ours, where you have more competition for those consumer clicks. Yeah, I would say to 2028 and beyond, I mean, outside of some major shift, there's a lot of continued growth I would expect in that industry. Another interesting thing I would comment there is, when we look at our market share versus the overall industry, like in insurance, in online performance marketing, which is essentially where we sit in insurance, we probably actually have a lower market share than just about any other industry we're in, even with as big as insurance is for our business. My guess is we are well below 20% market share, just within our group. There's the whole industry that's going to keep growing for the next few years, and then there's the ability to grow our market share within that industry. Yeah, I would have very positive outlook for the insurance industry right now. Great. Then, I think, Jason, you mentioned expenses have grown about 3%. Just with AI, how do you feel like, relative to your competitors, your opportunity, how do you think you're invested in AI? Do you think you can continue growing expenses at 3%, 4%, or do you think you're going to have to invest more so you can kind of better harness this technology? Thanks. Yeah, I mean, we're still in the 2027 planning phases, I guess, so it's hard to put out a number at this point. But we've had a lot of success using tools that we have today to drive a lot of efficiency on the AI front. When you look at how we run marketing and just using data agents, for example, within marketing, the amount that we've been able to upskill our marketing team by using agents to handle sort of the data gathering and analysis part of their jobs allows them to become much, much more efficient marketers. So, we're using the tools that we have today with a lot of success, and we fully intend to keep doing that. It's possible that as we move into 2027, we do wind up investing more in AI, but we would expect an outsize increase in productivity moving forward. Thank you, and good quarter. Yeah, I would just add in there, yeah, it's a little bit of both. There's areas we're going to invest into. Data is a critically important area to have quality of data infrastructure for AI to work effectively. Logged-in experience, like I was saying. But you can get, just like everyone said, you can get so much more done with fewer people in this age of AI. At the same time, we're looking where AI can provide efficiencies. So, it kind of levels out to some extent when you look at it that way. Thank you. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Youssef Squali from Truist. Youssef, your line is now open. Hi, great. Thank you so much. Scott, I was intrigued by your comments about working with LLM platforms, at least in theory, to integrate some of your capabilities within the agent results. Are you actually talking to some of these platforms, and what kind of feedback are you getting from them? What kind of reception are you getting from them? Then a follow-up. Yeah, we're actively engaged in some platforms, out more so than others. It's, yeah, it's honestly, these companies are growing so fast. They help you where they can. They give you directional information as far as they're like a lot of these times, they don't even know how their systems work any more than anyone else knows how it works. So, they're trying to give you directional, like, "Okay, here's where we believe the AI is finding value and not finding value." There's definitely a number of, and this is more of a recent thing, and a number of, I guess I'll call them internet protocols are starting to be developed that makes it easier for AI agents to communicate with companies like ours. I think the fact that we're making sure we're building our platforms to be able to easily communicate with LLM agents, because not everyone's going to be doing that, obviously. Not that we're the only ones doing it, but I mean, the group of us are going to be front-end doing that, we'll do it. Yeah, I mean, I would say all the major LLMs or just AI companies, we've got relationships with. There's only so much they know or they can tell you, but they can help you, direct you the way you should be going. Got it. Okay. Maybe on the other two sub-segments, home and consumer, it's very encouraging to see that you guys still posted positive growth. As we look at 2027, can you maybe just kind of share your initial outlook as to kind of the potential growth prospects for these and still the headwinds ahead, X maybe just rates, which God knows what's going to happen there? Yeah, I mean, I'll start and Scott can chime in here. I mean, like I said, we're still a little early in our planning for 2027, so we're not putting out guidance or numbers really at this point. Just thinking about the backdrop, like Scott said, insurance, we expect continued tailwinds for a while. Combined ratios are still very low. I think carriers are going to very carefully manage those combined ratios. Carrier interest is very high, so I think we'll have a very favorable environment in insurance moving into 2027 and beyond. Home, like you said, it's a bit more challenging, right? Mortgage is in a hard spot. The home sales are at a very, very low level. I want to say 20, 40-year low. So, it's hard to be excited about mortgage, but at this point, home is really driven by home equity. There are record home equity balances, and people are renovating their homes. So, there's a real opportunity within home equity to drive growth. I guess I would say, we're really excited about the opportunity to drive traffic. Scott touched on it, but we're under-indexed in several channels that we fully intend to lean into in 2027 and beyond. Our strategy is focused on driving organic traffic, and we think we can have a real impact moving into 2027 and beyond there as well. So, it's a little bit early to be putting out numbers, but I think the backdrop is generally favorable for insurance. It's a little bit complex with home, but it's going to be home equity driven. Consumer, it's really about SMB. We did see a lot of headwinds in SMB early in the year. That's improved. It's been improving. I think we expect it to continue to improve, but it's hard to really guarantee that. So, it's really more about how are we going to execute to find additional traffic moving into 2027 and make those investments to keep driving growth. Yeah, I would just add in briefly, small business, if it continues to recover, I mean, that's a big wild card. If it gets back to where it was in Q4, Q1 this past year, which it very well could, that would be major growth in and of itself. So that's something we're excited about. As I said before, like a real focus on getting more and more users to sign up to become logged-in members of LendingTree and active users, which increases our long-term value, decreases our cost of acquisition over the long run. Those are major metrics. I mean, so if we can start showing, improving out those metrics, that will have a significant impact, not only on profitability, but just ability to drive more consumers on top of the funnel. All right. Thank you both. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ryan Tomasello from KBW. Ryan, your line is now open. Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking the questions. Hearing a lot of comments about the focus on growing organic traffic and investing there and understand that makes sense over the long term. Just want to make sure we're understanding that properly, if there's anything you're telegraphing there around incremental investment next year, and how should we think about the ability to continue to sustain double-digit EBITDA growth, even if we do see some incremental investment in parts of the business like that? Thanks. Yeah, I'll hit on it. There's basically two lines. We think there's ability to grow a lot of organic traffic by a number of the things we're building in the login experience and just being better about more proactively. We've already been doing some testing about more proactively getting consumers that are upfront shopping for whatever product they're shopping for to get them to become login members. I would say we're pretty excited about our ability to onboard members. Then you got to create that long-term value. That would be like the organic growth. We also feel that there's a lot of growth just in areas where we've arguably been under-indexed compared to our competitors over the last number of years, and that would be social media, which is a massive world of consumers, business development, publishers. We've been building a lot of ad tech around that over the past nine months, and we'll probably continue investing even more heavily in that to just really get to have really good platforms and good ad tech where we can go and place our ads and have publishers and partners more easy to work with us. We feel like that's just a major, like I would almost call it, if you build it, they will come situation. We just got to build more of the stuff, onboard more partners, and that will just drive a lot more traffic there as well. Great. Appreciate that. To follow up on SMB, maybe Scott, if you can just put a finer point on how the recovery trajectory looked in that business coming out of the second quarter, whether or not you learned anything incremental on the drivers of the earlier weakness, what questions might still be out there, and how you're thinking about that recovery progressing into next year. Yeah, I would say, in Q2, the biggest drivers were you had bad, for at least early Q2, bad lender sentiment, and mainly because these lenders have written a lot of loans in the previous like six to nine months, and they just kind of wanted to, the Iran war started, et cetera, they just wanted to take a timeout, just make sure the loans were performing. Then you had bad merchant sentiment, which a lot of it was gas prices and the Iran war and stuff. I think small, medium-sized businesses are probably honestly even more sensitive to that than consumer lending even is. When we got out of Q2, what we saw, the lender sentiment completely turned around, where they're like, "Okay, our loans are performing. Everything's going great. Let's get back to business. We're offering loans at the same rate and term that we were a year ago." So that's fully recovered. So that's a really good part. The merchant sentiment has recovered, but not fully. That's where we're still seeing the take rates on loans are lighter than they were in our peak, Q4, Q1 peaks, and then the average size of loan is a little lighter. We just feel that that's still just kind of a little bit of merchant sentiment, just concern on the macro economy and stuff. I mean, that's something we fully Once the sentiment turns around, I mean, we have a long-term history of what the take rate on loans generally is and what the average loan size really is, and no reason to believe we won't be right back there. Any way to quantify how far below you are on those take rates and average loan sizes? I mean, I guess one way to look at it is comparing to our original budget. If SMB was performing at the original budget, we would be north of $160 million EBITDA this year. Great. Thanks for the color. Yeah. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Danny Pfeiffer from JP Morgan. Danny, your line is now open. Hey, thanks for the questions. For the first, as you have discussions with insurance carriers, can you talk about what their mindset is as it relates to partnering versus blocking agents and where LendingTree might fit in that equation? On the second, on the topic of making progress on logged-in member experience, can you talk about your ambitions here and if you could share any stats on the member base today in terms of size, return frequency, or monetization? Thanks. I'll start with the first part of the question, just with the insurance carriers. I would say, yeah, insurance carriers historically, they don't want their rate tables publicly available to the world because they don't want to start this downward spiral of everyone having to give rate, and it's like everyone has to lowball on the upfront rate. If you rewind the insurance industry 30 years ago, it was a similar problem where they were more public with the rates, but then it was just, they had to lowball for the first six months and then jack everyone's insurance rate up by 50% after six months. Horrible consumer experience, like, bad insurance. They don't want to get back to that world, and they've made it very clear. When they look at some of these agents, like a Muse coming out and being able to scrape sites that provide rates publicly, which honestly is not a ton of carriers that do that, but there are some that do that. I think, like I was saying, in the market share of LLMs overall right now and the quantity of consumers actually using LLMs to shop for insurance, I don't think they're seeing the quantity that really concerns them yet. Now, if they started all of a sudden seeing hundreds of thousands of unique rate requests a day, my guess is they would pretty quickly shut that down. Now, where they work with us and as they're working with us, getting back to the logged-in experience, we've had a number of carriers already tell that we're actively building with some. They're like, "Okay, you're logged in. We don't want to show rates on your public-facing site, but your logged-in users that are your users, we're more than happy to show rates and let you do secret shopping and provide a lot of value that way." That's a perfect example of where I think our platform is a specialty agentic AI platform, and the insurance and financial services space will be much greater than what any LLM that has honestly much bigger fish to fry will accomplish. What was your second question? Yeah, maybe on the second, if you could provide any stats or anything on the logged-in user base in terms of anything like the size or return frequency or monetization. No, we are not currently providing any stats on this front publicly. Got it. Thank you. Just for competitive reasons. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Mike Grondahl from Northland. Mike, your line is now open. Hey, guys. Thanks. A question on your 4Q guidance. Scott, would you say that that pretty much reflects seasonality, typical seasonality in the business, or is there, I don't know, a weakness in a business line you hadn't expected earlier in the year? Just trying to get a feel for how you're thinking about that 4Q. Yeah, I can start, and then Scott will chime in. I mean, we'll just go segment by segment, I guess. Home, home is seasonally lower in Q4. It might be a little bit more low than normal seasonality, just given the environment. Consumer is generally going to be flat sequentially Q3 to Q4, with sort of offsetting seasonality between personal loans and small business. Small business has a strong Q4. Personal loans tends to have a weaker Q4. The real uncertainty is with insurance. The last few years, we have gotten very large budgets towards the end of Q4, and so the guide isn't assuming the sort of budgets that we've gotten in prior years. We are assuming we do get sort of a seasonal uptick in insurance budgets, but just less than we have in the prior years. We're just being conservative there. That is inherent in the guide. But no, there's no single business that's performing particularly poorly Q3 to Q4, to answer your question. Just to add, the only thing I would add on there is if you look year-over-year, the biggest driver would probably be small business. So, as small business keeps improving from the Q2 trough, but again, I'll reiterate, the Q4, Q1 were all-time highs last year for us. Even though we're improving and we're coming back, there's still a way to go to get to those levels, and that's probably the single biggest driver if you look year-over-year. Got it. That is helpful. On the buyback, it seemed like you signaled you are going to be engaging in that here in Q4. Is there one or two metric? I mean, I imagine maybe it is debt to adjusted EBITDA has gotten to a level where you are comfortable. It seems like the cost structure, you have got your arms around really tight with inflation growth. Help us think about your kind of appetite for buyback and amongst those metrics. Yeah. I mean, we are looking at a lot of things. We have declared our target debt level is $200 million. In last quarter, we were sitting on $397 million of gross debt in a rising interest rate environment relative to our $200 million target. So, we made a big dent in that debt, and we are going to continue paying down debt and returning money to shareholders that way. When it comes to the buybacks, when you look at where our stock is and has been compared to our free cash flow, it is just pretty obvious that it is an attractive opportunity that we are going to take advantage of. Like I said, we drove, looking back trailing 12 months, $100 million of free cash flow when you exclude litigation payments. You look at that relative to our market cap, it becomes pretty compelling pretty quickly. That is a big one that we are looking at, as well as our EBITDA multiple and the growth implied in it. It all points to a pretty easy decision to lean in and buy back shares in Q4. Great. I know it has taken a lot of hard work and a couple years to get there, but congratulations, guys. Thanks. Thanks. Thank you. This concludes the question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn it back to CEO Scott Peyree for closing remarks. Thank you. Just to close, we appreciate you all joining the call and asking the questions you asked. We're just looking forward to continuing to execute and being able to report on continued improvements in the business next quarter. Have a good evening. Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program, and you may now disconnect.