QuinStreet - Q2 2026

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good day and welcome to QuinStreet's fiscal second quarter 2026 financial results conference call. Today's conference is being recorded. Following prepared remarks, there will be a Q&A session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Vice President of Investor Relations and Finance, Robert Amparo. Mr. Amparo, you may begin.

Robert Amparo (VP of Investor Relations and Finance)

Thank you, operator. Thank you, everyone, for joining us as we report QuinStreet's fiscal second quarter 2026 financial results. Joining me on the call today are Chief Executive Officer Doug Valenti and Chief Financial Officer Greg Wong. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that the following discussion will contain forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those projected by such statements and are not guarantees of future performance. Factors that may cause results to differ from our forward-looking statements are discussed in our recent SEC filings, including our most recent 8-K filing made today and our most recent 10-Q filing. Forward-looking statements are based on assumptions as of today, and the company undertakes no obligation to update these statements. Today, we will be discussing both GAAP and non-GAAP measures.

A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures is included in today's earnings press release, which is available on our Investor Relations website at investor.quinstreet.com. With that, I will turn the call over to Doug Valenti. Please go ahead, sir.

Doug Valenti (CEO)

Thank you, Rob. Welcome, everyone. Fiscal Q2 was another productive and successful quarter. We exceeded our outlook for both revenue and Adjusted EBITDA. And even more importantly, we continued to make good progress on needle-moving initiatives across the business. We see the setup for continued long-term revenue growth and margin performance as better than ever. Auto insurance demand remained strong again in fiscal Q2, with sequential performance besting historical seasonality trends. We continue to expect further significant growth in auto insurance revenue and margin in coming quarters and years due to strong client and marketplace fundamentals and to our rapidly expanding product, market, and media footprints. Home services continues to grow at double-digit rates and is now running at close to $300 million per year in revenue, between $400 million-$500 million per year with the addition of HomeBuddy.

Our outlook for that business, what we believe to be our largest addressable market, remains strongly positive short and long term. I just mentioned HomeBuddy. Subsequent to quarter end and as previously announced, we completed the acquisition of HomeBuddy, adding unique new product, media, and clients to home services. HomeBuddy has mastered the technology and execution of auction-driven exclusive leads, a product in high demand by large segments of the home services client market and one that we did not yet have. Also, their focus and success building big-scale campaigns in social and native channels brings vast new sources of media, helping us meet fast-growing client demand. We expect HomeBuddy to extend our long history of successful M&A. Most recently, that history includes Modernize Home Services and Aqua vida Media.

Modernize is now the core business of our home services client vertical, where our revenue has grown about 150% since the acquisition in 2020. Aqua vida Media is now our core social, native, and display media platform. Those channels have grown about 300% in revenue just since the acquisition in 2024. We are even more excited about the potential for HomeBuddy than we were about these highly successful transactions. Our total addressable market opportunity is enormous and growing, and we continue to deliberately, contiguously, and successfully expand our footprint. We still estimate that we are less than 10% penetrated in our current addressable market footprint. We are also focused on continuing to adapt aggressively and successfully to changes in our markets and ecosystem. Most prominently, our progress applying AI across the business and thriving in a more AI-driven ecosystem has already been strong, and we are continuing to increase those efforts.

We expect AI to lead to increased opportunities in our already big and fast-growing markets, and we expect to disproportionately benefit from AI due to our structured proprietary integrations and data and to our long history of successfully applying AI as a competitive advantage. Overall, we expect total company revenue growth and margin expansion in coming quarters and years. We continue to expect full fiscal year revenue, excluding HomeBuddy, to grow at least 10%, and full fiscal year Adjusted EBITDA, excluding HomeBuddy, to grow at least 20%, both consistent with our previous outlook. We also expect to achieve our next milestone margin goal to reach 10% quarterly Adjusted EBITDA margin in this fiscal year, even excluding HomeBuddy. Said another way, our core business remains strong, and HomeBuddy is purely additive and accretive to our previous outlook.

Turning now to our new outlook, which of course includes HomeBuddy, we expect total revenue in fiscal Q3 to be between $330 million-$340 million, and total Adjusted EBITDA to be between $26.5 million-$30.5 million. We expect total revenue in full fiscal year 2026, which, as a reminder, ends in June, to be between $1.25 billion-$1.3 billion, and total full fiscal year Adjusted EBITDA to be between $110 million-$115 million. With that, I'm going to call over to Greg.

Greg Wong (CFO)

Thank you, Doug. Hello, and thanks to everyone for joining us today. Fiscal Q2 was another productive and successful quarter, as Doug noted. It was the second consecutive quarter of record revenue for QuinStreet in what is typically our seasonally lowest revenue quarter. The strong performance was driven by impressive execution across our verticals. For the December quarter, total revenue was $287.8 million. Adjusted net income was $14 million or $0.24 per share, and Adjusted EBITDA was $21 million. Looking at revenue by client vertical, our financial services client vertical represented 75% of Q2 revenue and declined 1% year-over-year to $216.8 million. Auto insurance momentum continued in the quarter, growing 6% sequentially versus the September quarter, significantly outpacing typical seasonality. From a year-over-year standpoint, we were down 2% as we were comping against an unprecedented surge of insurance carrier spending in the year-ago period.

Non-insurance financial services, which includes personal loans, credit cards, and banking, grew 10% year-over-year. Our home services client vertical represented 25% of Q2 revenue and grew 13% year-over-year to $71 million. Turning to the balance sheet, we closed the quarter with $107 million in cash and equivalents and no bank debt. Moving to the tax front, our provision this quarter includes a one-time benefit of $48 million related to the reversal of our valuation allowance against our deferred tax assets that we established in fiscal year 2023. We expect to return to a three-year cumulative profit position by the end of this fiscal year, so this entry was required by GAAP. To be clear, this one-time benefit is a non-cash item and is excluded from non-GAAP results.

Moving on from our Q2 results, I'd like to spend some time discussing our recent acquisition of HomeBuddy and our capital allocation priorities. Starting with HomeBuddy, HomeBuddy expands our product, media, and client footprints for growth at scale in what we believe is our largest addressable market: home services. While our home services vertical has been growing at a compound annual growth rate of over 15%, even combined with HomeBuddy, we serve less than 1% of a massive market that we estimate spends more than $70 billion on marketing. We closed the acquisition of HomeBuddy about a month ago in early January. As a reminder, the terms of the acquisition include $115 million at closing. We funded this amount with $45 million in cash from our balance sheet and $70 million drawn from our new $150 million revolving credit facility.

Terms of the acquisition also include $75 million in post-closing payments payable equally over four years. As previously communicated, when we announced the acquisition, we expect HomeBuddy to generate $30 million or more of Adjusted EBITDA in the first 12 months after closing. Although early in our integration of HomeBuddy, we are working on capturing synergies to drive that number even higher. Overall, QuinStreet remains at a strong financial position, and we expect to generate strong cash flows in the coming quarters. We continue to have a rigorously disciplined approach to capital allocation and will continue to prioritize: 1) investing in new products and initiatives for future growth and market expansion, 2) accretive acquisitions, and 3) share repurchases at attractive levels. We will continue to be measured in our approach and remain focused on maximizing shareholder value. Overall, our long-term outlook has never been better.

We expect strong revenue growth and margin expansion to continue in coming quarters and years, with our near-term next milestone goal still to reach 10% quarterly Adjusted EBITDA margin in this fiscal year, even excluding the expected accretive impact of HomeBuddy. As a reminder, we have three key levers to expand EBITDA margin: 1) growing and optimizing new higher-margin media capacity to meet auto insurance market demand, 2) growing higher-margin products and businesses in insurance and in non-insurance client verticals to represent a higher percentage of our overall business mix, and 3) capturing operating leverage from top-line growth through scale and from efficiency and productivity initiatives. In other words, growing revenue and media margin dollars significantly faster than operating expenses.

Turning to our outlook, which includes HomeBuddy, we expect total revenue in fiscal Q3 to be between $330 million-$340 million and total Adjusted EBITDA to be between $26.5 million-$30.5 million. We expect total full fiscal year 2026 revenue to be between $1.25 million-$1.3 billion and total full fiscal year Adjusted EBITDA to be between $110 million-$115 million. With that, I'll turn it over to the operator for Q&A.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session. Should you have a question, please press the star key followed by the number one on your touch-tone phone. You will hear a prompt that your hand has been raised. Should you wish to decline from the polling process, please press the star key followed by the number two. If you are using a speakerphone, please lift the handset before pressing any keys. One moment, please, while we assemble the queue. Your first question comes from Zach Cummins of B. Riley. Please, go ahead.

Zachary Cummins (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Yeah, thanks for taking my questions and congrats on a strong quarter, Doug and Greg. Doug, I just wanted to start off asking about just AI in particular. I know that's been a big worry in the market here in recent weeks. But first, can you talk about the traffic trends you've been seeing with your platform in recent months? Have you seen any meaningful changes in terms of channel or overall traffic volumes? And then second, I know you touched on this a little bit in your script, but can you just speak to how QuinStreet can position itself to navigate the changes in the landscape as AI becomes more prevalent?

Doug Valenti (CEO)

Yeah, Zach, thank you for the question. In terms of traffic trends, only positive. We haven't seen no negative trends. Or let me say this: we have seen only net positive trends in the traffic, and we expect that that will continue to be the case. I think we have a record amount of volume with, say, Google on that platform. And most of the searches now, as you know, involve AI-based answers and searches. It's only created more opportunity for us to get deeper and have more places to run our campaigns. So short answer: net positive, and it's strongly net positive. You can see it in our performance trends. You can see it in our forecasts, and we're seeing it in the data. So fears there would be unfounded.

In terms of the overall AI landscape, which is obviously apparently on everybody's mind right now, there seem to be if we step back, there are kind of two big concerns. One is the AI bubble, and the other is the AI disruption or disintermediation. I think we can all agree that the bubble concerns don't really apply to us given where we're now trading relative to our strong performance and scale as we've traded down with the sector broadly defined. With respect to fears of disruption and disintermediation of existing business models, that's pretty clearly overblown across and has been pretty indiscriminate, of course, as it's kind of pulled in software, SaaS, information services, performance marketing, and all of those things. It's not surprising it's been overblown and indiscriminate. It's kind of what happens early in these big risk cycles, interpreted as risk cycles, but pretty clearly overblown.

Don't take my word for it, obviously. I mean, Jensen Huang, who knows more about AI than any of us will ever know, is quoted, as you know, in the past couple of days talking about it and saying it's just illogical to him. It doesn't make sense. AI is much more likely to enhance or utilize the value-add business models and tools, software, and otherwise out there than it is to replace them. The CEO of Google just said basically the same thing yesterday. Certainly, that would be our view from the trenches as we actually do this stuff day to day. I would add, historically, most of the value of these big technology disruptions eventually accrues to the incumbents after the big platform and infrastructure companies are built, which is a phase, of course, we're going through now.

So that's exactly what we're also seeing on the ground in the trenches, applying and competing and working these businesses day to day. And as I think I've indicated before, we have a lot we've always had a lot of AI going on in our core marketplace algorithms function. Since 2008, that's been our core technology. And we've only added to that, of course, and we have activities across the business in applications of AI. So we certainly see ourselves as something that's going to be an example of that. Now, the fears of people being disintermediated, disruptive aren't completely unfounded. I mean, to the extent there are businesses that rely on commodity data or commerce and commodity products or that are doing simple aggregation, simple manipulation, or simple intermediation of those areas, 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 when you combine all the variables. We have proprietary integrations and access to data that allows us to continuously generate more of it, refresh it, and build on it. And we have proprietary technologies, including AI since 2008, as I mentioned, that we utilize to optimize that data for the benefits of our consumers and of our marketing clients. And we also do that in a regulatory compliant and brand compliant way, which are highly, highly complex. So clearly, what we do is uniquely complex. It's not commodity. It is value-add. It's proprietary. And clearly, we've been successful.

We're good at it because if you look at our age and our size and our profitability, by definition, we're quite successful at it. So we see as AI comes, we see rather than the negatives and the disruption, what we see is a field of more, better, higher capabilities that is net additive in a very, very meaningful way to our business and to our company. We do not view it as a big threat. In terms of disintermediation, by the way, if our business model could have been disintermediated, there are some big players that already exist with massive capabilities that have done that a long time ago. The question we always ask - we have always asked because we take our moats quite seriously - is if someone were to try to disintermediate us with AI or otherwise, how would they do it?

Who would be able to do it? And how would they make money? And we just don't we can't and again, we do this to our as an executive team and with our product engineering team, ask this question all the time. And the answers are nigh on impossible, extraordinarily difficult. First of all, who would have the incentive because they got to be able to make money? How would they get access to or replicate the data, which, again, would take enormous amounts of time and money? It's not something you could just turn AI on, expect that the data is going to come. How would they access the data? Again, they can't get access to the proprietary integrations because the clients, among others, won't give it to them. And how would they make money? The money comes from the marketers.

So disintermediation would include not just disintermediating, say, a QuinStreet, but it would really mean disintermediating the client brands, which represent hundreds of billions of dollars of value and tens of billions of dollars of annual spend. So the money is in the marketing, which means the money is not in the disintermediation. So again, we don't see the risk that others see. We take it seriously. We look for it. We test against it. We ask ourselves. We question others in the industry. Nobody, by the way, has been able to counter any of what I just said. But we see more opportunity, not less, going forward. And clearly and hopefully, that's reflected in our performance recently and in the past and in the forecasts that we've given. So probably longer than you signed up for, but I think in this environment, something that is worthy of that.

Zachary Cummins (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Absolutely. Thank you so much for the color, Doug. I'll keep it to just one more follow-up question. In terms of auto insurance trends, nice to see the sequential increase here in what is seasonally a slower quarter on the auto insurance side. As we lap into calendar year 2026, can you give us a sense of just the appetite and spending trends you've been hearing from your clients? I know premiums are likely to moderate, but it seems like profitability is in a great spot for many of these carriers. So just curious to hear conversations and trends you've been seeing across your auto insurance carrier base.

Doug Valenti (CEO)

Sure. Very strong engagement, very strong interest, a lot of focus on the channel, a lot of focus on how to do better and eventually bigger in the channel. On the other side, there's been an unprecedented surge in their spend overall and certainly in the channel over the past year or so. They're still digesting that. They're kind of on this new plateau that's growing incrementally but not growing at high rates from here while they sort out how that worked for them and what they want to do to optimize further and what risks lie ahead, including having enough, and by the way, you're right. Their economics are in great shape. Their financials are in great shape. So they have great capacity.

Based on what we observe, it appears that they're weighing that against, are there places where they should now be reducing rates? What are going to be the eventual full effects of tariffs and many other factors? I would say that strong engagement, very stable, incremental growth. I'd say that returning to a more normalized growth rate, which we would consider to be between 10% and 20% year-over-year, is probably on the not-too-distant horizon as long as there's not some big externality impact from something that nobody expects. But these guys, the carriers, are extraordinarily sophisticated. They're balancing a lot of different things. They're adapting as they go. I know there's been some concern out there about rates and what happened in New York, people fearing that there'd be impact on rates. That's just normal course for the auto insurance industry.

This is the stuff that goes on all the time, different states having different points of view about the rates and where they are. These companies, our clients, these sophisticated auto insurance carriers are extraordinarily adept at adapting and adjusting and navigating and moving forward. We don't see any of that as being a material risk to what we're likely to see from them going forward.

Zachary Cummins (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Understood. Well, thanks again, Doug, for taking my questions, and best of luck with the rest of the quarter.

Doug Valenti (CEO)

Thank you, Zach.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from Jason Kreyer of Craig-Hallum. Please go ahead.

Jason Kreyer (Senior Research Analyst)

Great. Thank you. So just wanted to touch on HomeBuddy and kind of the cross-sell opportunity there. Specifically on the media side of things, I think HomeBuddy opens up a lot more reach in terms of media. So maybe if you can just talk a little bit about what that cross-sell can look like. Thank you.

Doug Valenti (CEO)

You bet, Jason. It's a great question. That's probably the most exciting part of the HomeBuddy combination. We are really, despite the great success of Aquavita, which was kind of our toe in the water in what is the place where there's the most consumer traffic on the internet, which is the combination of social display and native, we are kind of nowhere in that overall ecosystem because the traffic is quite different in terms of its intent than the search ecosystem that we have grown up in and that we are so good at. So what HomeBuddy does is it brings demonstrated ability to build these campaigns at scale in that biggest media footprint on the internet. They already do $140-ish million in revenue. They're all in that media.

They do it very successfully in terms of quality client results and very successfully in terms of economics. So they figured that out. So we could have continued to spend a lot of money figuring it out and climbing that learning curve ourselves. But we were able to acquire HomeBuddy on very attractive terms and in a way that gives us that access and that capability immediately so we can now scale it rather than continue to work our way up that scale learning curve. The cross-sell there is enormously important because if you look at our home services business today, our GM there just recently said every client wants more, every client. So that's the demand side of the marketplace, if you will. The supply side is media.

So having now the ability to scale dramatically in a very predictable expert way that HomeBuddy brings to us in that media ecosystem to continue to feed the growing demand for digital performance marketing from our growing footprint of home services clients is enormous. I can't say enough about how exciting and what a big deal that is for us. And the other side of it, as I indicated in my preparatory remarks, is they also have a unique product that works great in their ecosystem but also works in our ecosystem, which is this auction-based exclusive, a product that's fairly complex in its technology and implementation and execution. It's their core. It is their only product, basically. And so taking that product and selling that into our client footprint is also a big opportunity.

Both are big, but if you made me pick one, I'd pick the media side, like you appropriately pointed out. That's a big deal.

Jason Kreyer (Senior Research Analyst)

Wonderful. I'm going to pivot on the follow-up here. So the last couple of quarters, Doug, you've highlighted some R&D initiatives that you think can drive accelerated growth, drive improved profitability. I think embedded in there are things like QRP, things like Finance 360s. I know you have others in there. Curious, how are these tracking? And when do you think these initiatives can get to the point of scale where they become more noticeable to fundamentals?

Doug Valenti (CEO)

That's a great question. You named a couple of them. Others include new media in auto insurance to meet demand at a higher margin and expanding our insurance footprint into places other than just auto insurance clicks, which would include leads, calls, and selling more into the agent-driven models. We historically were dominated in our insurance business for clicks to direct carriers, great carriers like Progressive and Allstate and GEICO and pretty much all the major carriers. But that's only half the market in terms of marketing spend. The other half is in the agent-driven carriers. And that's a place that we're spending a lot of time and money. And it comes to us because of our abilities at very attractive margins and a place that we see hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of new revenue opportunity.

And we're up to about a $100 million revenue run rate there now. So we're getting that one to pretty good scale, but there's a heck of a lot more to come. And then there's the whole commercial or small business side, which has enormous demand from our clients and represents if you look at overall demand from auto insurance to consumers and then insurance, or P&C, if you will, for consumers and insurance to small businesses, they're kind of half and half of the overall market. So we're currently concentrating about a quarter of the overall addressable market. Still a lot of opportunity in that quarter, but we're expanding our footprint into another one of the quarters, which is the agent-driven side of P&C.

And in the other half, which is the SMB and consumer-driven side, we're further along in the agent-driven P&C, but we are making good progress on the SMB and commercial side, and we have a lot of runway in front of us. So those are also components of that. So I would say that some already at good scale, leads and calls, into P&C consumer, agent-driven, like I said, running $100 million a year or so and very strong performance. Others are getting to better scale. 360 and QRP are both growing very rapidly. And together, we'll represent well north of $10 million in revenue, high variable margin revenue this fiscal year. We're getting near the tail end of our heavy lift in R&D spending for those products, and we're really much more into the scale and profitability era for those products.

And I could probably name 5 or 6 or 7 other initiatives in the various businesses across the company, including owned and operated media for auto insurance, owned and operated media for credit cards, which are two areas that we've spent a lot of money developing. And we're much further up those learning curves, both in terms of scale but also in terms of profitability than we were a couple of months ago, let alone 6, 12 months ago. Yeah. So big initiatives across the business. I think in terms of your answer, in terms of when you're going to see their effects, you're seeing the effects now. We have forecast a pretty significant increase in our Adjusted EBITDA margin this quarter and next quarter.

And Greg alluded to the various components of what's driving that, one being new capacity, better margin media in auto insurance, O&O media in auto insurance, and other media, higher margin media in auto insurance. I know one being growing these new higher margin initiatives and businesses, some of which I just talked about, and the third leg being just leverage from greater scale on a slower-growing semi-fixed cost base. So you have seen it lately as we've ramped Adjusted EBITDA margin back up after the effects of the initial surge in auto insurance.

You're going to see it this quarter, the current quarter, and you're going to see it grow significantly and incrementally yet again in fiscal Q4 because, again, we've said, "Listen, we fully expect that we're going to hit that 10% Adjusted EBITDA margin number from the 7.3% we just did last quarter." In this fiscal year, on a quarterly basis, even without HomeBuddy, and HomeBuddy is accretive to that. So those are kind of some of the moving parts. Hopefully, that gives you a good view of it.

Jason Kreyer (Senior Research Analyst)

Yeah. Really good color in that answer. Thank you, Doug. Appreciate it.

Doug Valenti (CEO)

Thank you, Jason.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from Eric Martinuzzi of Lake Street. Please go ahead.

Eric Martinuzzi (Senior Research Analyst)

Yeah. The growth rate on the home services business, kind of the legacy side here, the last couple of quarters has been about mid-teens. Is HomeBuddy growing at a similar rate?

Doug Valenti (CEO)

HomeBuddy's been growing at a little bit faster rate lately. So net, Eric, we still, as we've said before, we expect the average compound growth rate of our home services business going forward to be between 15% and 20%.

Eric Martinuzzi (Senior Research Analyst)

Okay. And then as I looked at the kind of implied math for Q4 based on the Q3 guide, at least in my model, I've got a little bit more of a hockey stick in Q4 than I had as I'm revising the model. Just wondering if there was any abnormal seasonality, either in the legacy business or in the HomeBuddy-acquired business, as you look out to Q3 and Q4.

Doug Valenti (CEO)

That's a good catch. And in fact, there is seasonality in the home services business, both our legacy business as well as in HomeBuddy, and a pretty significant seasonality. The March quarter's one of the weakest quarters, not surprising, right? There's snow and ice everywhere, so people aren't doing a lot of gutter replacements or things like that. And then the activity grows pretty dramatically. And the two strongest quarters are the June and the September quarter. And so dominantly, what you're seeing there, Eric, is that effect from a now combined, as I indicated earlier, home services business that represents between $400 million and $500 million of our total revenue. So pretty significant seasonality, weakest quarter, one of the two weakest quarters, December and March quarters.

And then you're seeing the June quarter, which is our fiscal Q4, being one, which is historically the strongest quarter in the home services industry. So that's the impact or effect you're seeing.

Eric Martinuzzi (Senior Research Analyst)

Got it. Thanks for taking my questions.

Doug Valenti (CEO)

You bet.

Operator (participant)

As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one. Your next question comes from Patrick Sholl of Barrington. Please go ahead.

Patrick Sholl (Research Analyst)

Hi. Thanks for taking the question. On the other financial service verticals, I think you mentioned that those were up year-over-year. I think you had talked about kind of just the difficult comp in credit cards in the last quarter. So can you maybe just sort of just talk about the environment for those services right now, just in the current macro environment?

Doug Valenti (CEO)

Sure, Pat. I would say the environment is good, not great. We still have tons of growth opportunity, even in a good or less than good environment because we're still pretty early and relatively small in our footprint in all of those businesses. Those businesses are what we generically call personal loans, should probably more specifically internally, we refer to it as financial solutions because it includes not just personal loans, but HELOC, debt settlement, credit repair, and a lot of other services to consumers. So still early in our overall growth planning and strategy there. Those markets are in pretty good shape. Fortunately, or unfortunately, debt settlement and credit repair have been in pretty strong demand over the past number of quarters, and they're likely to and look like they're just getting stronger as that consumer cohort faces more and more pressure.

The personal loans business is solid and doing better. Most of the lenders have been opening up their demand in their filters. And then we have other newer components there, like I said, HELOC and others, that we are super early in but are showing very good signs. So I would say it's a good environment. It's not a great environment because there is some concern among clients that the consumer, or at least the working consumer, is under a lot of stress. Again, that's not bad for some of what we offer, like debt settlement. In terms of just to get to a couple of the other pieces of it, credit cards, we serve premium consumers pretty much only. We're dominantly the high-end credit cards, the travel points credit cards. So that business is in great shape.

There's a ton of competition among the banks, as you probably know if you're exposed to any media. We're trying to sign up customers for their premium travel credit cards. There's a lot of money in that, a lot of interest in that. There's been a little bit of concern lately about the notion of somebody trying to impose a 10% limit on credit card interest. What we've heard from the industry and from the clients is that that is extraordinarily unlikely. The clients are not behaving as if that is going to happen. They're not changing their appetite. Their spending habits. We have the unique position of being one of only a couple of companies that can run third-party media networks for all the major credit card issuers. We're very good at that. That's a great competitive advantage and a great opportunity.

We are aggressively building on top of that, a lot of owned and operated media, which has been something we've been investing in and that we're super excited about continuing to scale in that market. And our clients only want more from us. It's another one of those verticals where the only complaint we typically get from a client is, "We need more from you. We want more." So we're aggressively working to build that out into a good appetite. And then the banking side, which is kind of the smallest of the three of those pieces, which is where we really deal with source of funds accounts, CDs, savings, high-yield savings, more and more brokerage accounts. We're just super early. The demand is strong. We're not seeing macro effect-wise, we're not seeing anything that I think is notable given how early we are in our penetration.

It's a massive market opportunity. We're super early. It's a very, very good business for us. I think we feel like we're going to continue to do well, though. We've seen a little bit. There's been some clients that have kind of been in and out of the CD market. Every time there's a big threat of interest rates coming down faster than anybody expected, you'll see them pull back a little bit because they don't want to commit to CD consumers if the rates are going to come down immediately. So there's been a little bit of choppiness, but I wouldn't say enough that I would call any kind of big macro effect.

I would say that it's just kind of part of the volatility we're seeing generally in the current economy, some associated with what I might say is what I might call unpredictable government intervention, so.

Patrick Sholl (Research Analyst)

Okay. And then maybe just a couple of questions related to AI. Just maybe with all the capital being committed to AI investments, are you seeing any difficulty in attracting or retaining talent? And then you kind of talked about just the sources of traffic. Are you seeing specifically, you highlighted the Google search results and the incorporation of AI there. Could you maybe sort of talk about if you're seeing any change in what you're seeing, a little bit more detail on what you're seeing on the traffic patterns of whether coming from SEO versus your partners and your other sources there? Thank you.

Doug Valenti (CEO)

Yeah. Sure. We are not seeing a loss of or difficulty recruiting. I would point out, and this is an interesting fact, that the chief strategy officer at OpenAI is a former QuinStreet employee, for if anybody wants to understand how QuinStreet is integrated into the overall market. But no, we're not seeing problems attracting or retaining talent anywhere in the company, let alone in our tech group, in our AI group. There's a lot of good talent out there, and we have a lot of projects, and we're able to keep those folks and attract those folks. In terms of Google traffic, more and more traffic does come from SEM, which is paid traffic, around GEO searches, generative engine optimization searches. And we're very, very successful in the SEM component.

We always have been, and we're only getting more opportunities to do that at greater scale in the current Google format. We are seeing pretty good progress in GEO. We don't have much by way of SEO. We deemphasized that years ago. Our SEO has actually been fairly stable, not declining any kind of significant rates, but it's not material anyway. It's not something that we made the decision a number of years ago not to focus on it because we knew that Google did not want people to focus on it. They want to build partnerships with folks like us where we pay for media. They're not that interested in sending us free traffic. We made that strategic decision a long time ago. It's not a significant component of either our traffic nor really of our third-party media.

That transition has happened over a number of years. Yeah, the mix has shifted to more SEM around AI-based searches. That's good. Again, we see that as providing us with even more opportunity to be even more targeted and segmented in our spend. We're very, very good at that.

Patrick Sholl (Research Analyst)

Okay. Thank you.

Doug Valenti (CEO)

Thank you, Pat. Oh, yeah, Pat.

Operator (participant)

There are no further questions at this time. Thank you, everyone, for taking the time to join QuinStreet's earnings call. Replay information is available on the earnings press release issued this afternoon. This concludes today's call. Thank you.