Organic Search Headwinds Persist for SMB Lending Products at NerdWallet

NerdWallet’s SMB finance referral business grew only 6% year-over-year last quarter. The company said that “an increase in business loan originations was partially offset by continued pressures in organic search traffic.”

NerdWallet execs have previously stated that borrowers shifting to AI to get their answers to monetary questions is impacting the industry. And that’s been a challenge for them since they’ve historically depended on organic search traffic to source customers.

“In terms of SEO, organic search has become a fraction of what it was for us after 3.5 years of rapid declines,” said NerdWallet CEO Tim Chen during the Q3 earnings call, “the pace of declines has stabilized a bit, in recent months. So just as a reminder, educational content has been severely impacted as Google puts AI summaries in search results.”

One analyst asked how NerdWallet could continue to compete with some of the big LLMs that are now veering into personal finance functionality and product recommendations all on their own.

“I think for us, a big piece of this is the marketplace dynamic,” Chen responded. “Consumers have to often make complex decisions, especially in areas like insurance, personal loans, mortgages, where there is risk-based pricing. And in order to do that in a compliant manner, you really need a trusted marketplace that has inventory and the pricing that is going to send you to the right place. And so that is where we are in conversations with both the model companies as well as constantly with consumers. And I think there is an opportunity to do that in an agentic world. Now exactly what shape that takes I think it is still being sorted out in terms of how the economics work. I think it is going to be much more liquid in some verticals and not going to change that much in others. But we want to be ready for all eventualities there, so we are definitely making the investment today.”