- 1NerdWallet's Q2 SMB products revenue was $25M, down 4% year over year.
- 2CEO Tim Chen says AI Overviews now cover a much broader set of queries.
- 3LLM referrals show higher purchase intent but remain small.
NerdWallet, which runs one of the largest online small business lending marketplaces in the U.S., says AI is already hurting a customer channel it has long relied on. The company reported SMB products revenue of $25 million for the second quarter, down 4% from a year earlier, "primarily due to pressures in organic search traffic."
Search pressure
CEO Tim Chen said on the Q2 earnings call that the story is much like last quarter: organic search is still challenged. What has changed, he said, is that Google's AI Overviews have rolled out to a far broader swath of queries in recent months, so more people get answers without clicking through to websites. Search results now serve more than links, and NerdWallet's reliance on organic traffic makes it an early test case.
A small new channel
The company has seen early signs that large language models are sending it referrals. Chen said users who arrive from LLMs have materially higher intent to transact than those who arrive from search engines. He cautioned that, while encouraging as a new growth channel, it is still pretty small.
For small business lenders and brokers that depend on search-driven lead flow, the comments point to the same shift: AI answers are cutting into clicks.
Source reporting: deBanked.
