System1 Q3 2025 Earnings Report

System1 EPS Results

• Actual EPS: -$2.30
• Consensus EPS: N/A
• Beat/Miss: N/A
• One Year Ago EPS: N/A

System1 Revenue Results

• Actual Revenue: $61.56 million
• Expected Revenue: N/A
• Beat/Miss: N/A
• YoY Revenue Growth: N/A

System1 Announcement Details

• Quarter: Q3 2025
• Date: 11/5/2025
• Time: After Market Closes
• Conference Call Date: Wednesday, November 5, 2025
• Conference Call Time: 5:00PM ET

System1 (NYSE:SST) (NYSE: SST) is a technology-driven marketing company that leverages machine learning and first-party consumer intent data to connect advertisers with potential customers. Headquartered in Venice, California, System1 focuses on developing automated, data-powered solutions to drive performance marketing across digital channels. The company’s platform captures real-time consumer insights and applies predictive analytics to optimize ad delivery and improve campaign efficiency.

The business operates through two primary segments: Consumer Acquisition and Consumer Research. In the Consumer Acquisition segment, System1 provides targeted lead-generation and performance-based advertising services to clients in industries such as financial services, insurance, telecommunications and e-commerce. The Consumer Research segment offers an on-demand digital testing platform that enables brands to evaluate new product concepts, advertisements and user experiences with a panel of online consumers.

Founded by Lance Weaver, who serves as Chief Executive Officer, System1 completed its initial public offering via a special-purpose acquisition company in early 2021. The company serves clients across North America, Europe and Australia, partnering with both direct-to-consumer businesses and larger enterprises to enhance marketing ROI through its proprietary technology and data infrastructure. System1 continues to invest in AI and machine-learning capabilities to expand its suite of data-driven advertising and research services.

System1 Q3 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Key Takeaways

• Negative Sentiment: Google's AdSense for Domains (AFD) was effectively sunset, which materially hit the marketing segment (marketing revenue down 43% YoY) and forced a rapid transition away from a historic monetization source.
• Positive Sentiment: The product segment is growing: product revenue was up 8% YoY, sessions rose 23% YoY, and recent launches include MapQuest app redesigns, Startpage's private AI chat "Vanish," and CouponFollow international expansion.
• Positive Sentiment: Management is accelerating AI integration and "agentic coding" to speed product development and roll out new AI-powered consumer agents, which they say is improving engineering efficiency and will drive future product launches.
• Neutral Sentiment: Q3 consolidated revenue was $61.6M (‑31% YoY) with adjusted EBITDA of $9.9M (‑4% YoY); the company ended the quarter with $54.6M cash, $265M term loan debt and ~4.1x net leverage, and is not providing Q4 guidance yet.
• Negative Sentiment: System1 identified significant invalid/non-human traffic from a large advertising partner, is seeking reimbursement and may pursue legal action, creating partner, revenue and potential litigation risk.

Presentation

[Kyle Ostgaard, VP of Finance at System1]

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call for System1. Joining me today to discuss System1's business and financial results are our Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Michael Blend, and our Chief Financial Officer, Tridivesh Kidambi. The recording of this conference call will be available on our investor relations website shortly after this call has ended. I'd like to take this opportunity to remind you that during the call we will be making certain forward-looking statements. This includes statements relating to the operating performance of our business, future financial results and guidance, strategy, long-term growth, and overall future prospects. We may also make statements regarding regulatory or compliance matters. These statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those projected or implied during this call.

[Kyle Ostgaard, VP of Finance at System1]

In particular, those described in our risk factors, including in our annual report on Form 10-K for fiscal year 2024, filed on March 10th, as well as the current uncertainty and unpredictability in our business, the markets, and the global economy generally. You should not rely on our forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. All forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on management's assumptions and beliefs as of the date hereof, and System1 disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by law. Our discussion today will include non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA and adjusted gross profit. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for or in isolation from our GAAP results.

[Kyle Ostgaard, VP of Finance at System1]

Information regarding our non-GAAP financial measures, including a reconciliation of our non-GAAP financial measures to our most comparable historical GAAP financial measures, may be found on our investor relations website. I would now like to turn the conference call over to System1's Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Michael Blend.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and, CEO at System1]

Thanks, Kyle. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining System1 on our Q3 Earnings Call. Q3 performance reflected solid execution across many of our strategic initiatives, including our ongoing push to integrate AI across our company and strong growth in our higher margin product segment. Our strong execution was offset by a previously anticipated disruption at one of our primary monetization sources, Google. Specifically, in Q3, Google reduced monetization on its AdSense for Domains product, which we refer to as AFD, effectively sunsetting that product. AFD had historically been a significant part of our marketing business. Its effective deprecation had a negative impact on our O&O marketing and partner marketing business lines. While this Google volatility impacted results across our marketing segment, our core operations remained strong, and we continued to deliver healthy profitability.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and, CEO at System1]

Revenue for the quarter was approximately $62 million, with adjusted gross profit of $36 million and adjusted EBITDA of $9.9 million, each down 4% year over year as we navigated the marketing volatility. Without the Google disruption, we would have shown significant growth in both gross profit and our bottom line. The product segment continues to show strong year-over-year growth, with revenue increasing 8% from Q3 2024. Our Startpage, MapQuest, and CouponFollow teams continue to introduce new features that extend our product reach and boost engagement, contributing to a 23% year-over-year growth in sessions. Now, as I mentioned, our marketing business had a volatile quarter as we were no longer monetizing traffic through Google's AFD product as of the end of Q3.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and, CEO at System1]

While we had anticipated Google's transition away from AFD and had been focusing our efforts on Google's replacement product, the AFD transition did occur sooner than we expected. While the timing was not ideal, it now allows our team to focus fully on Google's Related Search on Content product, which we refer to as RSOC. We are the market leader in RSOC and believe it represents a much larger and more durable opportunity than our legacy Google business. We continue to make great progress on the technology front. We're very excited at the pace that we are developing and releasing platform features and new products. Regarding AI-powered agentic coding specifically, we are seeing increasing efficiency gains and are planning to launch some new products specifically addressing the AI space. More to come on that in the future.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and, CEO at System1]

Now let's go into more details on our product segment, which continues to post strong year-over-year gains. Product revenue was $22.5 million and adjusted gross profit was $21.2 million, up 8% and 6% year over year respectively. Sessions increased 23% year over year and were up 12% sequentially, reflecting continued consumer adoption of Startpage, MapQuest, and CouponFollow. While we saw a significant increase in total sessions, revenue and gross profit fell sequentially due to a decrease in revenue per session. This decrease was driven by some weakness in advertiser demand, most acutely in our CouponFollow business, where certain advertisers pulled back due to tariff uncertainty. RPS fell 16% from Q2, driving a 6% sequential revenue decrease. On the product development front, we had significant releases across each of our major products, which I wanted to spend some time highlighting.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and, CEO at System1]

CouponFollow, our promo code and couponing service, continues to execute on its plan for international expansion. In Q3, we launched language-specific sites in both Germany and France, following a previous launch in Poland. We see international as a large opportunity for overall growth, given most of our current CouponFollow business is currently domestic. CouponFollow also continues to grow the distribution footprint of our promo code browser extension called Sently, and our cashback shopping business line via expanded partnerships. Moving on to MapQuest, the team has been quickly pushing out product enhancements to our consumer mapping offering that competes with Google Maps and Apple Maps. In Q3, we launched completely redesigned and re-architected apps for both iOS and Android. In addition to a UI refresh, new features included easier-to-read map styles and CarPlay support for iOS.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and, CEO at System1]

In addition to core mapping improvements to our existing user base, MapQuest is adding new social features designed to attract a younger demographic. One example is building mapping features for younger users who increasingly use social media videos for things like restaurant recommendations or retail reviews. Users can now watch a video on TikTok or Reels and then import that video into MapQuest. MapQuest then uses AI to parse the video, extract any addresses such as retail stores or restaurants, and then automatically build a customized map of favorites for the user. We're very excited at the pace of innovation in MapQuest and expect to see user features released at an increased cadence going forward. Startpage, our private search engine, also released a new AI-focused product in Q3. A new private AI chat product that we call Vanish.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and, CEO at System1]

Vanish is a mobile app that offers access to ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity through Startpage's signature privacy proxy layer. Users' IP addresses, queries, and conversations are not logged, and conversations remain private. We believe Vanish meets an increasingly important consumer need, which is maintaining privacy while using AI to address increasingly private issues like healthcare and legal matters. These updates on our products business have a common theme, which is significant investment in strengthening our core businesses. CouponFollow, MapQuest, and Startpage are strategic assets, all having differentiated positions in large addressable markets with strong and defensible moats. Their growth is inherently more predictable than the marketing business. As a result, we plan to increase our investment in these products throughout the rest of the year and into 2026.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and, CEO at System1]

Our specific focus is on acquiring more direct users who aren't one-and-done users sourced from SEO or at risk for AI-related disruption. The more people we have directly using our products, the less dependent we are on any third-party distribution platforms. In addition, we will continue to use our strategic assets as starting points to develop new products in the search, shopping, and geolocation spaces. We're going to be aggressive in using agentic coding to build and release new products, use our marketing expertise to quickly measure consumer demand, kill products when we don't see enough demand, and rapidly scale them when we do. Rather than make expensive all-or-nothing bets, our goal is to essentially build an assembly line to rapidly roll out new products and then put real investments when we identify the winners.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and, CEO at System1]

Now let's go into more detail on our marketing segment, which includes both O&O and partner marketing-driven businesses. There's no way to sugarcoat it. Marketing had a difficult quarter. Marketing revenue came in at $39 million, down 43% year over year and down 28% sequentially. Advertising spend was down 54% from Q3 2024 and down 37% sequentially. Adjusted gross profit was $16.6 million, down 14% year over year and down 15% sequentially. The sequential decline was driven by lower traffic acquisition costs as TAC from both our O&O and partner business declined. Google's effective wind-down of its AFD product has impacted both our O&O and partner marketing businesses. Our efforts to move business to Google's new RSOC product have been going really well, but AFD still represented a meaningful portion of our marketing business. For example, in Q2 of 2025, AFD still made up 27% of total marketing revenue.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and, CEO at System1]

As we complete the transition away from AFD, our O&O business has been focused on scaling advertising campaigns and has started exploring new initiatives using non-Google monetization. Our partner marketing business continues to remain focused on adding quality partners, and in Q3, we had approximately 180 active partners. On a positive note, we now believe our transition to Google's new RSOC product is nearly complete. It has been very difficult navigating the last two years with Google, and you have seen that in almost continually declining revenue across our marketing business. Now that the transition is over, we can focus on getting back into growth mode. While we expect some near-term volatility with RSOC as Google continues to make product changes, we anticipate greater stability heading into 2026. We believe we're well-positioned to return this segment to growth in the coming quarters.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and, CEO at System1]

I did want to cover one more point on traffic quality, which is an issue we take very seriously. Earlier this year, we identified the traffic we had sourced from a large advertising partner included significant invalid or non-human activity. After an internal review and an independent third-party verification, we requested reimbursement for this traffic from the advertising partner. We are still in active discussions with them. As of now, the partner has not agreed to our requests. We intend to vigorously pursue our claim against the advertising partner, as well as the technology platform which brokered the invalid traffic. We will use all possible means, including potential legal action. This type of traffic pollutes the overall advertising ecosystem. System1 remains committed to enforcing the highest standards of traffic quality across all of our traffic sources and advertising partners.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and, CEO at System1]

Looking ahead to 2026, we are focused on accelerating growth in our product segment through product expansion and a robust pipeline of new launches. The marketing businesses will continue to diversify, supported by a platform built for automation and scalability. For example, we recently launched new initiatives to source traffic from premium publishers, lead generation partners, and social media influencers, and we are actively working to scale each of these new channels. Our overall progress is masked a bit by the decline in our marketing business. That said, our teams are executing well, and we believe we're well-positioned for the medium and long term. Our products businesses continue to perform, and we believe that we are at a trough in the marketing business. We continue to believe that we are undervalued and will continue to invest in opportunities that we believe can provide significant upside.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and, CEO at System1]

System1's leadership team remains fully aligned with our shareholders, and as a group, we remain one of the company's largest shareholders. As System1 continues our transition back to growth mode, we appreciate your continued support. With that, I'll hand it over to Tridivesh to go over our financials.Take it away, Tridivesh.

[Tridivesh Kidambi, CFO at System1]

Thanks, Michael. As Michael made clear in his remarks, we experienced mixed results in the third quarter, as continued volatility in the marketing segment offset solid execution across other areas of the business. Delivering these results despite having one of our main monetization sources be effectively deprecated underscores the strength of our diverse operations and the stability of our broader business. Let's get into the details. Q3 revenue was $61.6 million, representing a 31% year-over-year decrease and a sequential decrease of 21%. Marketing GAAP revenue was $39.1 million, down 43% year-over-year and down 28% sequentially.

[Tridivesh Kidambi, CFO at System1]

Products revenue was $22.5 million, up 8% year-over-year but down 6% sequentially. The sequential decline reflected softer monetization trends, which we view as more indicative of current market conditions than of execution. Adjusted gross profit was $36.1 million, down 4% year-over-year and down 12% sequentially. Product segment profit was $21.2 million, up 6% year-over-year but down 7% sequentially. Sessions increased 23% year-over-year and 12% sequentially, reflecting strong execution by our teams driving more users to our products. RPS declined 12% year-over-year and 16% sequentially to $0.04, reflecting lower monetization driven by reduced advertiser demand. Product segment profit represents 56% of total segment profit, up from 51% in the third quarter of 2024. Before diving further into gross profit trends for the marketing segment, I wanted to add some color with respect to the AFD monetization channel and the impact of these changes on our financial results.

[Tridivesh Kidambi, CFO at System1]

As previously disclosed on the company's earnings calls for the fourth quarter of 2024 and the first and second quarters of 2025, the company noted that Google had previously announced it was going to opt advertisers out of the AFD product on a rolling basis and indicated the possibility that the AFD monetization channel could be eventually discontinued as part of industry-wide changes to advertising and traffic quality requirements. For the six months ended June 30, 2025, the AFD monetization channel contributed approximately $94 million, or 39% of marketing platform revenue, $34 million, or 32% of marketing revenue, and generated approximately $12 million of gross profit, or 28% of marketing adjusted gross profit. The company expects the loss of this monetization channel to reduce marketing segment revenue and adjusted gross profit in future periods.

[Tridivesh Kidambi, CFO at System1]

The contribution of AFD to our financial results in Q3 was minimal, with only a $1.5 million of gross profit contribution. As Michael noted during his remarks, as of today, we have no active marketing efforts, neither through our owned and operated nor our partner lines on the AFD monetization channel going forward. That out of the way, let's discuss the marketing segment profit, which was $16.6 million, down 14% year-over-year and down 15% sequentially. The year-over-year decline was driven by a 24% year-over-year decrease in TAC, partially offset by an increase in return on TAC, or RTAC. RTAC was up year-over-year, going from 118% to 120%. Total platform revenue for the marketing business was down 23% year-over-year, all driven by increased volatility and declines in the owned and operated marketing businesses. The partner network business was performing well prior to the AFD wind-down.

[Tridivesh Kidambi, CFO at System1]

We view this disruption as temporary and continue to remain confident that the partner business will recover quickly and resume the strong growth trajectory we saw earlier in the year as it completes the transition to RSOC. On to operating expenses and adjusted EBITDA. In Q3, operating expenses net of add-backs were $26.2 million, down 4% year-over-year and down 10% sequentially. We remain focused on expanding operating leverage and making disciplined investments growth. Adjusted EBITDA was $9.9 million in Q3, down 4% year-over-year and down 16% sequentially. With respect to liquidity, we ended the quarter with $54.6 million of unrestricted cash on our balance sheet. As of 9/30, we had an outstanding balance of $265 million of term-loan debt under our credit agreement, and our net consolidated leverage at quarter-end was approximately 4.1 times.

[Tridivesh Kidambi, CFO at System1]

We also have $50 million of availability under our revolver as of the end of Q3, which is currently undrawn. We are not providing Q4 2025 guidance at this time. That said, we believe the majority of the volatility tied to the Google Marketplace dynamics are behind us, and we anticipate being in a position to provide guidance again in the near future. The product segment is well-positioned for continued growth, and the marketing businesses are expected to rebound as the Google Marketplace stabilizes. As Michael discussed, new growth initiatives leveraging our platform and emerging technologies will drive further expansion of the business. Our consolidated platform continues to generate operating cash flows, and coupled with our ongoing execution of cost-saving initiatives around operating expenses, we will have ample liquidity to invest and execute against our strategic initiatives and deliver sustained long-term growth and value for our stakeholders.

[Tridivesh Kidambi, CFO at System1]

Thank you for joining us today.

[Operator]

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please raise your hand now. If you have dialed into today's call, please press star 9 to raise your hand and star 6 to unmute. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Tom Forte with Maxim Group. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

[Tom Forte, Managing Director and, Senior Consumer Internet Analyst at Maxim Group]

Great, Michael and Tridivesh. Thanks for taking my questions. I have one question and one follow-up. I'll go one at a time. On its earnings call, Microsoft highlighted its market share gains for Bing. Can you talk about your efforts with Microsoft and if you're able to capitalize on Bing's market share gains?

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and, CEO at System1]

Yeah, thanks, Tom, and thanks for joining. Good to speak with you.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and, CEO at System1]

We do work pretty closely with Bing in a way similar that we work with Google. What we found in the past was that the reason why we've been such a large Google partner is the Google network, you know, essentially outperformed the Bing network historically. What we have been seeing over the last, I would say, two or three quarters is performance on the Bing side is starting to improve. As we're seeing monetization go up on the Bing side, we've been shifting a little bit more of our efforts over there. We do retain a pretty strong partnership with Bing. We had mentioned on our earlier remarks that the kind of.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and, CEO at System1]

The majority of our efforts on the marketing side are working with Google's new RSOC product, but we do have some business going with Bing and Yahoo as well, which operate out of the same network, and we would love to increase our business with both those companies.

[Tom Forte, Managing Director and, Senior Consumer Internet Analyst at Maxim Group]

Great, thanks, Michael. For my second final question, in your earnings release, you mentioned Startpage.com's efforts with ChatGPT and Claude, a Claude rather, which I thought was quite impressive. I was curious to find out if there are other ways you're working with OpenAI and Anthropic.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and, CEO at System1]

Yeah, just to reiterate, on the Startpage side, we've got a new product called Vanish, which is essentially private AI. We're pretty excited about the product.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and, CEO at System1]

One thing we've been hearing from consumers is that people are very excited about using chatbots and using AI, but as they increasingly are using them for things like legal work and healthcare and kind of a lot of the private matters that they're trying to get answers from, they get a little bit concerned about their questions kind of going out and feeding the LLMs and just not being private. We do think that a product like Vanish is going to potentially have some pretty good consumer acceptance. On a macro level, our company as a whole is working quite heavily with really all of the models. We've got business going. Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT to rebuild our platform and get our products built quicker. Specifically, as it relates to AI-related products, we don't have anything.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and, CEO at System1]

More than Vanish to announce, but we do intend on over the next year rolling out several consumer-focused agents in specific verticals that will be leaning quite heavily on AI to give the answers. We think there is a really nice opportunity on the consumer side, and we intend to capitalize on it.

[Tom Forte, Managing Director and, Senior Consumer Internet Analyst at Maxim Group]

Great, thanks, Michael. Thanks, Treaty.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and, CEO at System1]

Yeah, thanks, Tom. Appreciate it.

[Operator]

Thank you for your questions. I will now turn the call back to Michael Blend, CEO and co-founder, for closing remarks.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and, CEO at System1]

All right, thanks everybody for joining us on our earnings call. We look forward to presenting, hopefully, some good results on our next earnings call and speak to you in about three months. Happy Thanksgiving.

[Operator]

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.

Participants

Executives

• Michael Blend, Co-Founder and, CEO
• Tridivesh Kidambi, CFO
• Kyle Ostgaard, VP of Finance

Analysts

• Tom Forte, Managing Director and, Senior Consumer Internet Analyst at Maxim Group