- 1NerdWallet's SMB financing deal flow remains significantly below last year's level.
- 2CEO Tim Chen says Google AI overviews are the main source of LLM traffic, with ChatGPT and Gemini also contributing.
- 3The CFO expects further SMB degradation in Q4.
NerdWallet said again on its Q3 earnings call that its small business financing deal flow remains significantly below last year's levels, a drop it attributes to changes in organic search. The company also repeated that leads arriving from large language models convert promisingly.
Analysts finally asked what "LLM traffic" means and whether it refers to ChatGPT. CEO Tim Chen said the primary driver is "AI overviews within Google Search." As search gets more useful, he said, people search more, and traffic flows in from those overviews, with ChatGPT and Gemini also contributing to the increase.
Visitors who arrive that way tend to have high intent and are focused on finding something in a marketplace, Chen said, which he credited for higher transaction rates.
Not enough yet
LLM-sourced conversions are not currently large enough to replace the organic search conversions the company used to generate. CFO John Lee said NerdWallet expects continued degradation in SMB in the fourth quarter.
Source reporting: deBanked.
