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Feb. 23, 2026, 5 p.m. ET
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MediaAlpha (NYSE:MAX) reported record annual transaction value, revenue, and adjusted EBITDA, citing significant gains driven by the P&C vertical. Management stated that AI-driven search and LLMs are increasing P&C click volume, with open marketplace demand partners increasingly contributing to growth. The company is reallocating capital aggressively toward share repurchases, with a newly expanded buyback program, and substantial free cash flow expected in the coming year. The CEO outlined that industry structure and carrier brand strategies are likely to sustain MediaAlpha's infrastructure role, even as AI and LLMs shape initial customer shopping experiences. New and underpenetrated carriers are being successfully integrated into the platform, supported by expanded platform solutions and predictive AI capabilities.
Steven M. Yi: Hey. Thanks, Alex. Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us. 2025 was a pivotal year for MediaAlpha. We delivered exceptional results in our P&C insurance vertical, as auto insurance carriers and agents accelerated advertising spend, and we captured more than our fair share of that growth. At the same time, we narrowed the scope of our under-65 health insurance business, improving our risk profile and sharpening our strategic focus. We generated significant free cash flow, reflecting the strength of our operating model and our disciplined approach to expense management. We returned a significant portion of that capital to shareholders, completing $47,300,000 worth of share repurchases or roughly 7% of shares outstanding.
Our fourth quarter results were strong, with adjusted EBITDA above the high end of our guidance range. While transaction value came in modestly below guidance due to more normalized seasonality in our P&C vertical, open marketplace demand partners leaned in, driving solid revenue growth and a higher-than-expected take rate during the quarter.
Our P&C business is off to a strong start in 2026, and we expect continued positive momentum for the full year and beyond. Carriers remain solidly profitable and are increasingly focusing on growing their customer base. As is typical in the early stages of a soft market, competition is beginning to intensify, with many carriers lowering rates to gain share. Beyond pricing, advertising is the other primary growth lever available to carriers, and we expect advertising budgets to continue to increase. Given our unmatched scale, targeting capabilities across hundreds of supply partners, we expect carriers to allocate a growing share of wallet to our platform.
We are particularly focused on the opportunity to scale underpenetrated carriers in our marketplace, helping them optimize their campaigns and drive profitable policy growth. As these partnerships ramp, we expect our transaction value mix to shift gradually to our open marketplace, where we offer highly differentiated predictive AI-driven optimizations for our partners.
Looking ahead, I want to address the rapid pace of AI innovation and the tailwinds it is creating for our business. AI-driven search is emerging as an important new starting point for insurance shopping. Against the backdrop of accelerating LLM-driven traffic growth, we increased P&C click volume by more than 20% year over year in the fourth quarter, and we expect even stronger growth in Q1. This performance reflects our role as the core infrastructure layer, connecting carriers with high-intent shoppers regardless of where they start their journey. At the same time, we are embedding AI across our platform to price media with far greater precision, leveraging our massive proprietary data set as the largest marketplace in the category.
This allows us to price traffic more granularly, improving publisher yield while simultaneously delivering strong return on ad spend for carriers and agents. Our industry-leading scale and data advantage make these AI systems increasingly more effective over time, further strengthening our already powerful network effects.
We think about the potential for AI to reshape the insurance shopping and purchase experience, it is important to distinguish between how a consumer initiates a search and how a transaction is ultimately completed. Quoting and binding require real-time integration with proprietary carrier rating systems, and carriers are highly protective about how and where their rates are displayed. Major carriers invest billions each year in their brands, underwriting, and distribution, and they have historically resisted any model that commoditizes their product into a side-by-side price comparison or transfers transactional control to a third-party technology platform. As a result, we believe that most major carriers will continue to keep their pricing from being freely accessible through third parties, including through LLMs.
While AI is likely to influence where and how shopping begins, and create incremental advertising-based acquisition channels, we believe the infrastructure we provide to connect online shoppers to carrier-controlled quoting and binding systems will remain and highly defensible. Taken together, we believe the current industry backdrop, including the evolution of AI, is strengthening our role in the ecosystem. As demand expands, and distribution channels evolve, scale, data, and performance will matter more, not less, and we believe we are well positioned to capture that opportunity and to continue delivering sustainable, profitable growth in the years to come. I will now turn the call over to Patrick R. Thompson for the financial results. Thanks, Steven.
Patrick R. Thompson: I will start with some full-year highlights, followed by key drivers of our Q4 results, and then cover our outlook. 2025 was a record year. We crossed several significant milestones: $2,000,000,000 of transaction value, $1,000,000,000 of revenue, and $100,000,000 of adjusted EBITDA, all for the first time. Transaction value grew 45% driven by 65% growth in our P&C vertical, which more than offset the expected reset in under-65 health. Excluding contribution from under-65 health, our core business delivered adjusted EBITDA growth of approximately 55%. Turning to the fourth quarter, transaction value was $613,000,000, up 23% year over year. Our P&C vertical grew 38% year over year, while our health vertical declined 40%.
Revenue was $291,000,000, down 3% year over year as reported, but up 9% excluding under-65 health. Health declines were mostly offset by P&C growth. Under-65 health contributed approximately $7,000,000 of revenue in 2025, down from $41,000,000 in 2024. Adjusted EBITDA was $30,800,000, down 16% year over year. Excluding contribution from under-65 health, our core business delivered adjusted EBITDA growth of approximately 10%, reflecting the strong momentum in our P&C vertical. We converted 66% of contribution to adjusted EBITDA, which reflects our efficient operating model. Our Q4 take rate was 7.6%, slightly above expectations, driven by favorable open marketplace mix. We expect take rates in Q1 to be above Q4 levels.
Moving to the balance sheet and cash flow, in 2025, we generated $99,000,000 of free cash flow, which for us is operating cash flow less CapEx, excluding the FTC payment of $34,000,000, or $65,000,000 on a net basis. We ended the year with $47,000,000 in cash, providing us with continued financial flexibility to support our strategic priorities. Also on the balance sheet, we met the U.S. GAAP requirements to release the valuation allowance on our deferred tax assets and recognize the related tax receivable agreement liability, resulting in a gross-up to our balance sheet. As a reminder, our long-standing Up-C structure generates tax benefit from which we retain 15% of the savings through basis step-ups over the next fifteen years.
On capital allocation, we remain committed to returning capital to shareholders through share repurchases. In Q4, we repurchased approximately 1,100,000 shares for $14,000,000. Full-year share repurchases were $47,000,000, representing approximately 7% of the company. Based on our strong and growing free cash flow outlook, our Board has authorized a $50,000,000 increase in our share repurchase program to $100,000,000. We expect to complete the vast majority of this program in 2026.
Now turning to Q1 guidance, we expect transaction value of $570,000,000 to $595,000,000, up approximately 23% year over year at the midpoint, with P&C growing approximately 35% year over year, driven by strong carrier demand and continued share gains. We expect first-quarter transaction value in our health insurance vertical to decline approximately 50% year over year, driven primarily by under-65 health. Revenue we expect to be $285,000,000 to $305,000,000, up approximately 12% year over year at the midpoint. We expect adjusted EBITDA of $29,500,000 to $31,500,000, up approximately 4% at the midpoint. Excluding contribution from under-65 health, adjusted EBITDA is expected to grow approximately 25% year over year at the midpoint of the guidance range.
And finally, we expect contribution less adjusted EBITDA to be approximately $500,000 to $1,000,000 higher than in 2025. And while we are not giving formal 2026 annual guidance today, let me frame how we are thinking about the year. We expect P&C transaction value will continue driving growth, with healthy year-over-year gains as carriers increasingly seek to grow in an attractive soft market operating environment. In health, our transformation into a smaller, more focused operation is ongoing. While we expect this vertical to account for a mid-single-digit percentage of total transaction value this year, we continue to believe Medicare Advantage represents a meaningful long-term growth opportunity.
Finally, we expect to generate $90,000,000 to $100,000,000 in free cash flow, including the final $11,500,000 FTC payment we made in January. This gives us plenty of firepower as we look to execute on the vast majority of our $100,000,000 buyback program in 2026. With that, Operator, we are ready to take the first question.
Operator: Thank you very much. Quick reminder before we start the Q&A, to ask a question, please press star then one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question or your question has been answered, please press 1 again. Thank you. And we will take our first question from Thomas Mcjoynt-Griffith of KBW. Please go ahead.
Thomas Mcjoynt-Griffith: Hi. Good evening. Yes, my first question, appreciate some of your comments around some of the changes that are happening through the development in AI. I want to expand on that. Does anything functionally or financially change with your role and your value proposition to carriers when a consumer starts their search with an LLM rather than through Google?
Steven M. Yi: I think I will take that, Tommy. I mean, the short answer is no. You know, what we expect AI, the impact that we expect AI to have is really focused on the upper part of the funnel, the research and shopping experience. You know, I think what really what you have to understand is that no matter really where they start their shopping experience, ultimately, as they start to get closer to the quote and the buying, that is where the carriers really want to maintain control over where their quotes are displayed, obviously, where their policies are bound.
And so, you know, typically and historically, well over two-thirds of the marketplace made up by the big direct-to-consumer carriers as well as the captive agent carriers have been very reluctant to let their rates be shown anywhere else on third-party sites, particularly in a side-by-side rate comparison environment. And certainly, they have been very reluctant to let anyone bind their policies anywhere other than through their agents or their websites.
And so ultimately, we are the infrastructure that facilitates that handoff between the insurance shoppers and the publishers where that insurance shopping activity takes place, with the quoting and binding infrastructure that the carriers maintain, regardless of whether they start their search on Google or on an insurance comparison site, or on an LLM, ultimately, that connection and handoff has to be made. And so, you know, at the end of the day, we believe that the ecosystem, with the LLMs, again, being an important starting point for insurance search, is going to look a lot more like the current system than not.
Thomas Mcjoynt-Griffith: Thanks for that. And to clarify, so do the LLMs become their own supply partners or do the supply partners that you currently partner with, perhaps they will integrate within the LLMs directly?
Steven M. Yi: I think it is a good question. I see either possibility happening. I think we think it is more likely that it is more the latter, that the LLMs become a traffic source for most of our existing supply partners. I mean, certainly, some of our supply partners may not be able to acquire traffic in an efficient way from the LLMs. But once the LLMs layer on an advertising model, we think that could be a tremendous tailwind for our supply partners as that introduces an incremental advertising traffic acquisition source for them. Right now, I think they are making some good headway in acquiring traffic from the LLMs.
Anecdotally, our supply partners are telling us that somewhere in the mid- to high-single digits of their traffic is coming from the LLMs, and this is in the early stages. A couple of our supply partners have introduced apps for the LLMs. We are certainly benefiting from that because the traffic is hitting their site ultimately that we are monetizing on their behalf.
And so as our publishers and the supply partners get smarter about doing that and building more apps, finding ways to be discovered by the LLMs, and then ultimately taking advantage of the advertising ecosystem that the LLMs are going to create, we think that ecosystem is going to look a lot more like the current Google ecosystem than one where the LLMs are connecting directly with us as a supply partner. Certainly, we have had discussions with them, and if they are open to doing that, we would welcome that. But, again, our guess is that the LLMs will evolve into something more like a Google than one of our supply partners.
Thomas Mcjoynt-Griffith: Got it. That all makes sense. And then just my second topic of questions here. You made some encouraging remarks about continuing to scale with the underpenetrated carriers in the marketplace. Is there anything different about your go-to-market strategy or sales pitch that is getting more of these underpenetrated carriers to sign up? What is resonating with them that works around this cycle?
Steven M. Yi: That is a great question. I appreciate that. There is a different message. That is why we are investing heavily into our platform solution capabilities. And really what that means is that we are moving beyond just creating a marketplace layer for the media that is transacted, and really working directly with these carriers who have been historically underpenetrated in our channel to provide more of a platform where we own parts of the pre-quote conversion process, that we can optimize more of that conversion funnel for them.
As you can imagine, we have capabilities, and we have access to data that enable us to do that very well, and oftentimes better than a lot of carriers who are less experienced in that area.
And so the ability for us to really go in and, again, not just offer media from a marketplace, but also to offer a hosted optimized conversion experience that takes the first one to three steps of that conversion process and really optimize that on behalf of a lot of these historically underpenetrated carriers, I think has gone over really well, has enabled us to optimize their campaigns in our marketplace really well, and enable them to be a lot more competitive in our marketplace than they otherwise would have been had we not offered these types of solutions.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Mike Zaremski from BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Mike Zaremski: Hi, thanks. First question is on the P&C side. On seasonality, and appreciating it is already late February, so your guidance is clearly robust, but are we not seeing as much seasonality as you had maybe thought six months ago or three months ago, or is this kind of the normal expectations you would say?
Patrick R. Thompson: Yeah, and, Mike, this is Pat. I would say that the last few years, we have seen pretty robust volume in Q4. I would say Q4 of this year maybe was a little bit less robust than we thought it would be, but it was robust. And what we have seen in Q1 is probably a little bit muted versus what we maybe had seen in some past years.
Having said that, what we have seen is some of the smaller carriers that have under-punched their weight historically in our marketplace being the ones that have really been leaning in so far in Q1, and some of the bigger ones have taken their foot off the gas just a tiny bit. We are in a spot where it has been probably a number of years since we have had a really normal year from a seasonality standpoint, and we feel like Q1 is off to a good start. We are feeling pretty good about where the rest of February and March are going to end up, and we are feeling optimistic about the year.
So we are obviously feeling pretty good, although it is still very early overall in the year.
Mike Zaremski: Got it. That is helpful. And moving back, I know it is not easy to forecast the future. In regards to AI, and your comments have been very thoughtful so far. If we were to kind of bucket up into a profile of insurance carrier that was much more sophisticated data-wise than peers and also offered on average a lower-cost policy, would that profile make that insurance carrier more likely to test the waters to offer their pricing to third parties and LLMs? Is there any way to differentiate your broad strokes to a certain subset of insurance carriers?
Steven M. Yi: Yeah, Mike. I think you can think about the universe of auto insurance carriers as being split up into the captive agent carriers where you have exclusive agents—the State Farm is a typical example that you think of—with a network of agents who only sell State Farm policies. And so you have those captive agent carriers. You have the direct-to-consumer carriers or the direct writers—again, big brands like GEICO and Progressive. And then typically you have a lot of smaller carriers that write through independent agents.
As you think about historically, the carriers that have allowed their rates to be aggregated and put into a comparison environment—something akin to a Kayak for auto insurance—it has really been those smaller mid-size independent agent carriers that are used to selling in a multi-carrier environment through independent agents. What we expect is that to the extent that the LLMs start to pull in rates, typically by working with an insurance agency, the rates that they will be pulling in are going to be limited largely to those rates from independent agent carriers. Again, the captive agents and the direct-to-consumer model make up over two-thirds of the overall ecosystem.
What you will see is some rates, but you will see a subset of the carriers that the typical consumer is looking for. To analogize it back to Kayak, it would be like doing a search on Kayak for airfare and seeing rates from a handful of carriers, but really missing the rates from an American Airlines, United Airlines, and a Delta Air Lines. It is a good consumer experience—some of our publishers have that type of consumer experience—but by no means is it a complete and holistic search.
To the extent that rates are pulled into an LLM environment, we expect that it is going to remain similar to what it is now, being limited to those independent agency carriers.
Mike Zaremski: That is helpful. And just lastly, Pat, some free cash flow quick clarifications. The $90 to $100, is that including the final payment? And also, is there any cash taxes or cash receivable payments within that $90?
Patrick R. Thompson: Yep. The guidance is for $90,000,000 to $100,000,000 of free cash flow this year, and that includes the $11,500,000 payment that was made to the FTC. Absent that, we would be at $101,000,000 to $111,000,000. From a cash tax standpoint, there is a TRA payment that is going out in Q1—mid-single-digit millions—and that is kind of the star of the show from a cash tax standpoint for calendar 2026.
Operator: Thank you.
Patrick R. Thompson: Thanks, Mike.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Kligerman from TD Cowen. Please go ahead.
Andrew Kligerman: Hey. Good evening. I am a little confused still from your response to Mike’s question about two-thirds of the market being tied up in captive and direct, and that the LLMs would be just focused on the smaller mid-sized independent carriers. Because if I think of the large ones that do go independent—and I am not necessarily pointing to them—but Progressive has a big independent channel. Allstate has a growing independent channel. I think GEICO might be starting to dip into that.
So my question is, is it possible down the road, or is it actually happening now that big names such as the ones that I mentioned—and it does not have to be those specifically—is it possible that they are already in the mix and starting in these early stages with the LLMs? And why would that not be the case a few years from now regardless?
Steven M. Yi: That is a great question. We talk to our carrier partners, and by and large most of them—and these are the carriers that are the typical large-brand captive agent carriers as well as the primarily direct-to-consumer direct-writing model that you referred to—really, I do not think that they are in any hurry to make their rates available through the LLMs. Again, these carriers spend billions of dollars every year in being part of a small consideration set through brand advertising, and they invest similar amounts in building their underwriting capabilities and the distribution capabilities.
To the extent that they make their rates available through the LLM, really the only reason that they would want to do that, or an LLM would want to do that, is to make that rate-comparison model much more readily available. That is really the model that the carriers have fought strenuously against for the past 20 years. The technology to be able to pull in rates into a third-party environment has been there for 20-plus years, and the technology to actually have rates be compared side by side has been there for 20-some years.
It is really the carriers and their reluctance to see that type of a model really evolve in the United States that has been the limiting factor in actually offering a Kayak-for-auto-insurance model. There are some real good business reasons for that as well because it is extraordinarily hard to actually get a bindable rate across multiple carriers to one user experience.
The carriers are justifiably concerned not just about being commoditized to the lowest price, but also making sure that consumers are not being shown one price when, after all the inputs that have been entered that the carrier specifically needs to deliver a bindable quote, there is not a significant change from the quote that they saw when they started that process. Overall, you are right that some of these carriers are building independent agency capabilities or capability of selling through those agencies.
But I think at the end of the day, those big direct writers and the big captive agent carriers are going to prevent rates from their major brands—maybe their subsidiary brands might be included—but they are certainly going to prevent rates from their big brands from being aggregated onto the LLMs.
Andrew Kligerman: Thank you for that, Steven. And then the other question, I think Pat mentioned earlier that he sees Med Advantage being a strong long-term growth opportunity. And I know it has been a tough three or four years of pressures in that area for distribution. Could you talk a little bit about why it sounds like you are seeing an inflection point now and why do you see that? And how do you see the trajectory of Med Advantage business on your platform?
Patrick R. Thompson: I am happy to take that one. We are probably now in the fourth year of a challenging market for Medicare. I think 2023 was probably when it started, and I think this year is going to be another challenging year in Medicare, and looking at the crystal ball, I think early signs point to next year being challenging as well given some of the reimbursement news that is out there. For our health vertical, we have given the guidance for this year that we expect it to be a mid-single-digit percentage of total transaction value, so a very small portion of the mix. Having said that, when we look at Medicare Advantage, this is a large product.
There are tens of millions of consumers that have opted into Medicare Advantage. It is a product set where the number of eligible people is growing, and the number of people opting in are growing. In terms of total spend on Medicare Advantage premiums, it is a bigger market than personal auto. It is a market that has the wind at its back in terms of seniors aging into Medicare. Seniors are much more likely to look to the internet either as part of their shopping journey or their first port of call when it comes to shopping.
While the market backdrop for Medicare has been and likely will continue to be challenging for the next year or two, we look at all of these market dynamics, and all of these winds are blowing in the right direction and in a direction that suits us very well. As a result, we are long-term bullish but not banking on significant financial contribution from that business in the short term.
Andrew Kligerman: Got it. And maybe I could sneak one more in. Do you see the proprietary component continuing to pick up, or where do you see that? Because I guess private this quarter was about 53.7, up from 41 last year, and the full year was a similar pickup. So it has been happening. Where do you see the private percentage of transaction value leveling out? Are we there yet, or does it get bigger?
Patrick R. Thompson: We are in a spot where the guidance for Q1 envisions the business shift a bit towards the open marketplace and away from private. We talked pretty consistently in our earnings calls and our materials last year that we have this view that as more carriers caught up in terms of rate adequacy, we would see some of the smaller and mid-sized carriers and some of the folks that historically under-punched their weight in our marketplace start to lean in. We saw that happen as we went through Q4 of this year, and we have seen a furtherance of that trend thus far in Q1, and we have envisaged that in our guidance for Q1.
We feel like we are in a pretty good spot as far as that goes. We, as a company, go quarter to quarter with guidance; we do not give long-term numbers on that, but we feel pretty good about where we are at this point in time.
Andrew Kligerman: I see. So that would be the driver of why guidance in revenue is $285,000,000 to $305,000,000 against a consensus number that is lower than the lower end of the range. That is the bigger piece of why you have such really solid guidance going forward. Correct?
Patrick R. Thompson: That would be correct. Yes. The business is effectively more open than folks may have been expecting.
Andrew Kligerman: Thanks very much.
Patrick R. Thompson: Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Eric Sheridan from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Eric Sheridan: Thanks so much for taking the question. I will just really ask one. As you see this underpenetrated opportunity playing out in the coming quarters, how much of it is a dynamic in which you need to execute on putting the right tools and mechanisms in place for folks across the carrier landscape to incent them to come onto the platform, invest in the platform? And how much of it is just an output of some of the competitive dynamics you are seeing today and the in-your-control, out-of-your-control component of scaling the underpenetrated opportunity? Thank you.
Steven M. Yi: Eric, that is a great question. Ultimately, it is both, but I would say that the more important factor is the overall market ecosystem and the competitive dynamics at play there. As our numbers are starting to reflect, it is a broadly growth-oriented marketplace, to an extent that I certainly have not seen in my history of the company. After several years of really not acquiring new policies, and over the last year and a half to two years, we have seen a softening of the market as a very small number of carriers started to lean into growth and spend heavily to acquire new policies. The vast majority of carriers just did not do that.
This year, what you are seeing is that the overall personal auto marketplace is firmly in a soft market cycle, and you have essentially every single carrier really leaning into growth and finding ways to actually increase their policy count, and being open to new ways of doing that and new partnerships to really accelerate the impact that they can have by investing in a channel like ours.
Where we come in with our platform solutions, as well as the AI that we apply to enable these carriers to bid far more efficiently than they could on their own in our marketplace, that really stems from our ability and our willingness to really help them scale up their spend once they make the decisions to really lean in. I do not know which one is more important. I would say maybe the latter is more important in that market forces are certainly driving them to lean into marketing and customer acquisition, and we expect those market forces to last for the next two to three years.
Certainly, our capabilities, both with predictive AI and the experience and scale that we have to be able to offer the platform solutions that no one else can, have a really big part in helping these underpenetrated carriers really scale much more effectively than they would otherwise on their own.
Operator: Great. Thank you. There are no further questions. That concludes our question and answer session. That also concludes our call for today. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.
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