EverQuote (EVER) Smart Campaigns AI Bidding: 7 of Top 10 Carriers

EverQuote (EVER) said on its 2026-08-03 earnings call that seven of its top 10 insurance carriers now use Smart Campaigns, its AI bidding product, and that the amount of revenue flowing through the product grew more than 100% versus the same period last year [1]. On the 2025-02-24 call, management had said only that carriers were beginning to turn their bidding process over to the company [2]. Between those two calls, delegated AI bidding went from a new practice to the main way EverQuote's paying customers bid, and it was opened to local agents for the first time.

What Smart Campaigns is

EverQuote runs an online insurance shopping marketplace: consumers come to compare quotes, and insurance carriers and local insurance agents pay for each consumer lead with buying intent. Those payments are the company's revenue. Smart Campaigns is an advertising service sold to those paying customers. Customers used to decide for themselves how much to bid for each lead. With the service, the customer delegates that bidding decision to EverQuote, whose AI models — trained on the consumer shopping and conversion data the company has accumulated — bid on the customer's behalf, with the goal of getting policyholders that better match the customer's underwriting preferences for the same budget [1]. Inside the business, this is a core-business application, not a back-office support function.

How the application evolved

The starting point was taking the bidding decision out of the customer's hands. On the 2025-02-24 earnings call, management said the main investment aimed at carriers was AI bidding on their behalf built on EverQuote's own shopping data, and that many carriers were starting to hand the bidding process over. That call gave no result figures [2].

The first result management put on the record came on 2025-08-04: after another major carrier adopted the product during the quarter, its ad spend efficiency improved immediately by about 20% [3].

On 2025-11-03 the service appeared as a versioned product for the first time. Smart Campaigns 3.0 launched in the third quarter, and one customer that migrated from 2.0 saw a 7% improvement in ad spend efficiency [4].

These two percentages do not connect into a single product-capability curve. One comes from a new customer's first adoption and the other from an existing customer changing versions; each covers a single customer, and neither carries a stated base period or measurement window.

On 2026-05-04 the customer boundary widened for the first time. Management said the service had already produced budget increases from carriers and that the company was starting to extend it to local agents. That passage carried no numbers [5].

Where the AI bidding product stands now

The most recent period gave the first measure of adoption breadth. The 2026-08-03 earnings call disclosed that seven of the top 10 carriers use Smart Campaigns and that revenue flowing through the product grew more than 100% year over year. The same period put the agent version in the hands of a first group of customers; management said early data showed a clear improvement in conversion rates, but explicitly called it early and gave no figure [1].

The matching headline financial metric is revenue. The transmission path is that customers migrate advertising budget they previously controlled themselves into the service, which enlarges the budget flowing through EverQuote's marketplace and directed by its models; to the extent any of that is net new spending, it lifts the company's revenue.

The evidence supports directional association only. EverQuote does not disclose product-level revenue. "Revenue flowing through the product" is a budget measure, not a company-revenue measure, and it does not separate net new budget from budget migrated over from self-directed bidding — and management itself describes adoption as customers handing their bidding over. Three confounders sit alongside that growth figure: the prior-year period was a low point for carrier advertising spend, a single customer accounts for a high share of revenue, and management acknowledged that marketplace advertising prices have risen.

What to watch next

What this history supports today is that the expansion in adoption is verifiable while the revenue contribution is not: EverQuote does not disclose product-level revenue separately, and "revenue flowing through the product" measures how much customer budget has moved into the product, which is not the same as revenue EverQuote earns because of it.

The single piece of evidence most likely to change that reading is the company converting the budget measure into a revenue measure — either what share of total revenue flows through Smart Campaigns, or its absolute size. Only with that figure can the widening adoption be judged as incremental revenue.

Application assessment

• Smart Campaigns: the customer-facing productisation of EverQuote's AI/ML bidding, sold to insurance carriers and, from Q2 2026, to local agents, who delegate their bidding into EverQuote's marketplace auction to EverQuote's models. | Business position: core business | Adoption stage: limited production | Scope: single business unit | Value type: revenue gain

Sources

[1] Drillr - EverQuote, Inc. (EVER) - 2026-08-03 - earnings call

"Seven of our top 10 carriers now use Smart Campaigns, and in Q2, the amount of revenue flowing through the product increased by over 100% versus the same period last year."

[2] Drillr - EverQuote, Inc. (EVER) - 2025-02-24 - earnings call

"And a lot of carriers are now beginning to actually turn over their bidding process to us through the smart bidding solutions that we’re offering"

[3] Drillr - EverQuote, Inc. (EVER) - 2025-08-04 - earnings call

"Our data scale enables us to deploy AI throughout our traffic and distribution bidding and routing systems. For example, as another major carrier adopted our ML-driven smart campaigns product, it drove immediate improvement in their spend efficiency by about 20%."

[4] Drillr - EverQuote, Inc. (EVER) - 2025-11-03 - earnings call

"For example, a customer who recently migrated from 2.0 to 3.0 saw a 7% improvement in ad spend efficiency, an early indication that the new model is materially improved."

[5] Drillr - EverQuote, Inc. (EVER) - 2026-05-04 - earnings call

"Through smart campaigns, we have productized our AI-powered bidding capabilities, improving carriers' ability to optimize return on ad spend in our marketplace, resulting in budget increases and embedding our technology more directly in our clients' workflows."