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UNITED STATES

SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION

Washington, D.C. 20549

FORM 10-K

(Mark One)

For the fiscal year ended December 31, 2020

OR

FOR THE TRANSITION PERIOD FROM                      TO                   

Commission File Number 001-38233

CarGurus, Inc.

(Exact name of Registrant as specified in its Charter)

Registrant’s telephone number, including area code: (617) 354-0068

Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act:

Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(g) of the Act: None

Indicate by check mark if the Registrant is a well-known seasoned issuer, as defined in Rule 405 of the Securities Act. Yes  ☒   No  ☐ 

Indicate by check mark if the Registrant is not required to file reports pursuant to Section 13 or 15(d) of the Act. Yes  ☐    No  ☒

Indicate by check mark whether the Registrant: (1) has filed all reports required to be filed by Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the Registrant was required to file such reports), and (2) has been subject to such filing requirements for the past 90 days. Yes  ☒    No  ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the Registrant has submitted electronically every Interactive Data File required to be submitted pursuant to Rule 405 of Regulation S-T (§232.405 of this chapter) during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the Registrant was required to submit such files). Yes  ☒    No  ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a large accelerated filer, an accelerated filer, a non-accelerated filer, smaller reporting company, or an emerging growth company. See the definitions of “large accelerated filer,” “accelerated filer,” “smaller reporting company,” and “emerging growth company” in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act.

If an emerging growth company, indicate by check mark if the registrant has elected not to use the extended transition period for complying with any new or revised financial accounting standards provided pursuant to Section 13(a) of the Exchange Act.  ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has filed a report on and attestation to its management’s assessment of the effectiveness of its internal control over financial reporting under Section 404(b) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (15 U.S.C. 7262(b)) by the registered public accounting firm that prepared or issued its audit report.  ☒

Indicate by check mark whether the Registrant is a shell company (as defined in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act). Yes  ☐    No  ☒

The aggregate market value of the registrant’s Class A common stock, par value $0.001 per share, held by non-affiliates of the registrant based on the closing price of the registrant’s common stock as reported on the Nasdaq Global Market on June 30, 2020 was $2,193,762,306. Shares of voting and non-voting stock held by executive officers, directors and holders of more than 10% of the outstanding stock have been excluded from this calculation because such persons or institutions may be deemed affiliates. This determination of affiliate status is not a conclusive determination for other purposes.

As of February 4, 2021, the registrant had 97,723,371 shares of Class A common stock, and 19,076,500 shares of Class B common stock, par value $0.001 per share, outstanding.

Table of Contents

SPECIAL NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This Annual Report on Form 10-K contains forward‑looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, which statements involve substantial risks and uncertainties. Forward‑looking statements generally relate to future events or our future financial or operating performance. In some cases, you can identify forward‑looking statements because they contain words such as “anticipates,” “believes,” “could,” “estimates,” “expects,” “intends,” “likely,” “may,” “might,” “plans,” “potential,” “predicts,” “projects,” “seeks,” “should,” “target,” “will,” “would,” or similar expressions and the negatives of those terms. Forward-looking statements contained in this report include, but are not limited to, statements about:

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You should not rely upon forward‑looking statements as predictions of future events. We have based the forward‑looking statements contained in this report primarily on our current expectations and projections about future events and trends that we believe may affect our business, financial condition, operating results, and growth prospects. The outcome of the events described in these forward‑looking statements is subject to risks, uncertainties, and other factors described in the section titled “Risk Factors” and elsewhere in this report. Moreover, we operate in a very competitive and rapidly changing environment. New risks and uncertainties emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for us to predict all risks and uncertainties that could have an impact on the forward‑looking statements contained in this report. Further, our forward‑looking statements do not reflect the potential impact of any future acquisitions, mergers, dispositions, joint ventures, or investments we may make. We cannot assure you that the results, events, and circumstances reflected in the forward‑looking statements will be achieved or occur, and actual results, events, or circumstances could differ materially from those described in the forward‑looking statements.

The forward‑looking statements made in this report relate only to events as of the date on which the statements are made. We undertake no obligation to update any forward‑looking statements made in this report to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this report or to reflect new information or the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law.

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PART I

Item 1. Business.

BUSINESS

Overview

CarGurus is a global, online automotive marketplace connecting buyers and sellers of new and used cars. Using proprietary technology, search algorithms, and innovative data analytics, we believe we are building the world’s most trusted and transparent automotive marketplace and creating a differentiated automotive search experience for consumers. Our trusted marketplace empowers consumers with unbiased third‑party validation on pricing and dealer reputation as well as other information that aids them in finding “Great Deals from Top-Rated Dealers.” Our selection provides the largest number of car listings available on any major U.S. online automotive marketplace. In addition to the United States, we operate online marketplaces under the CarGurus brand in Canada and the United Kingdom. We also operate two online marketplaces as independent brands: PistonHeads in the United Kingdom and Autolist in the United States.

A core principle of the CarGurus marketplace is transparency. For consumers considering used vehicles, we aggregate vehicle inventory from dealers and apply our proprietary analysis to generate a Deal Rating as one of: Great Deal, Good Deal, Fair Deal, High Priced, or Overpriced. Deal Rating illustrates how competitive a listing is compared to similar cars sold in the same region in recent history. We determine Deal Rating principally on the basis of both our proprietary Instant Market Value, or IMV, algorithm, which determines the market value of a used vehicle in a local market, and Dealer Rating, a measure of a dealer’s reputation as determined by reviews of that dealer from our user community. As the only major U.S. online automotive marketplace that defaults to sorting organic search results based on a used car’s Deal Rating, we enable consumers to find the most relevant car for their needs. For new cars, we help our users understand deal quality by providing price analysis and our Dealer Rating. We also provide our users information historically not widely available, such as Price History, Time on Site, and Vehicle History. We believe this approach brings greater transparency, trust, and efficiency to a consumer’s car research and buying process, leading to higher engagement and a more informed consumer who is better prepared to purchase at the dealership. 

Our large, engaged, and predominantly mobile user base presents an attractive audience of in‑market consumers for our dealers. By presenting consumers with data such as our Deal Ratings, Price History, Time on Site, and Vehicle History, we believe our consumer audience is comprised of more informed, ready-to-purchase shoppers. By connecting dealers with such consumers, we believe we provide dealers with an efficient customer acquisition channel and attractive returns on their marketing spend with us. Dealers can list their inventory in our marketplace for free or with a subscription to one of our paid Listings packages. Non-paying dealers receive a limited number of anonymized email connections and access to a subset of the tools on our Dealer Dashboard at no cost. A dealer with a paid subscription receives connections with consumers that are not anonymous and are made through a wider variety of methods, including phone calls, email, managed text and chat, links to the dealer’s website, and map directions to its dealerships. The primary objective of our traffic acquisition and site improvement efforts is to generate greater volumes of consumer leads to dealers. Leads are a subcategory of connections that we define as user inquiries via our marketplace to dealers by phone calls, email, or managed text and chat interactions. Dealers with our paid Listings packages are able to display their dealer name, address, and dealership information on their listings on our websites to gain brand recognition, which promotes walk‑in traffic to the dealer. We also provide paying dealers with full access to our Dealer Dashboard, including inventory pricing tools informed by real‑time market conditions, which helps them more effectively price, merchandise, and sell their cars. Our success with dealers is evidenced by the number of paying dealers – 23,934 paying dealers as of December 31, 2020 – in our U.S. marketplace.

Our scaled online marketplace model drives powerful network effects. The industry-leading inventory selection offered on our website from our U.S. dealers attracts a large and engaged consumer audience. The value of robust connections to this audience incentivizes dealers to purchase our paid Listings packages. Displaying listings from more paying dealers provides consumers with more dealer information and methods to contact them. More consumers – 36.2 million average monthly U.S. unique users in 2020 – and connections – 63.4 million in the U.S. in 2020 – drive greater value to paying dealers on our platform. Driven by these network effects, we continue to amass more data, which we use to continuously improve our search algorithms, the accuracy of Deal Ratings, our user experience, and, ultimately, the quality of the connections between consumers and dealers.

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We generate marketplace subscription revenue from dealers through subscriptions to our products, including our paid Listings packages (which include optional features and enhancements such as Area Boost) and products marketed under our Real-time Performance Marketing suite, or RPM, including our Dealer Display advertising and audience targeting products. We also generate advertising and other revenue from auto manufacturers and other auto‑related brand advertisers, as well as revenue from non-dealer products such as through our consumer financing partnerships and our peer-to-peer marketplace. Our financial performance over the last several years exemplifies the strength of our marketplace. In 2020, we generated net income of $77.6 million and our Adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP financial measure, was $160.8 million, compared to net income of $42.1 million and Adjusted EBITDA of $77.0 million in 2019 and net income of $65.2 million and Adjusted EBITDA of $49.7 million in 2018. See “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations — Adjusted EBITDA” for more information regarding our use of Adjusted EBITDA and a reconciliation of Adjusted EBITDA to our net income.

Consumer Challenges 

As consumers determine the car they would like to purchase, the key questions they ask are: 

In answering these questions, consumers historically had limited access to unbiased information on specific vehicles, car pricing, and dealer reputation. Every vehicle is unique, and so for consumers searching for a car, it is difficult to aggregate the relevant inventory of available cars across sellers, a difficulty exacerbated by the lack of consistency in the way that dealers characterize a car’s attributes. Traditionally, dealers had more information about car prices than consumers did, as consumers had limited resources and tools to determine an appropriate price. Selecting the right dealer was also challenging for consumers as dealer reputations were historically based primarily on word‑of‑mouth. The lack of clear, unbiased, transparent information made it difficult for consumers to effectively compare vehicles, find the vehicles that best suited their needs and transact with well-regarded dealers. In addition, especially as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers are also increasingly interested in understanding which aspects of their buying journey they can carry out entirely online, including whether they pre-qualify for financing on a vehicle purchase before traveling to a dealership.  

Dealer Challenges 

The economics of dealerships depend largely on vehicle acquisition costs, sales volume, and customer acquisition efficiency. To achieve a high return on their marketing investments, dealers must find in‑market consumers; yet because car purchases are infrequent, only a small percentage of consumers are shopping for a car at any given point in time. Traditional marketing channels, including television, radio, and newspaper, can effectively target locally but are inefficient in targeting the relatively small percentage of consumers who are actively in the market to buy a car. In addition, used car pricing is fluid because it is based on rapidly shifting supply and demand dynamics. Dealers need to find ways to manage constantly changing inventory and adjust pricing strategies to adapt to frequently changing market conditions. 

Our Strengths 

We believe that our competitive advantages are based on the following key strengths: 

Trusted Marketplace for Consumers.  We provide consumers with unbiased information, intuitive search results, and other tools that aids them in finding “Great Deals from Top-Rated Dealers.” We offer the largest online selection of new and used car listings of any major U.S. online automotive marketplace. We aggregate and analyze these listings using proprietary technology and data along with innovative data analytics to create a differentiated automotive search experience for consumers. We believe that providing a transparent consumer experience with unbiased information has instilled trust in us among our users, helping us to become the most visited online automotive marketplace in the United States according to data

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from Comscore. In 2020, we experienced over 90.9 million average monthly sessions in the United States. We believe this user traffic, an indicator of consumer satisfaction and engagement, is critical to our marketplace success and will continue to strengthen our market position. We attract our audience from a diverse range of acquisition channels including, but not limited to, direct navigation, mobile applications, email, organic search, paid search advertising, social media advertising, display advertising, audience targeting, and brand advertising campaigns. In addition, we focus our efforts on attracting users that we believe are near a car purchasing decision, resulting in a higher quality audience to which our dealers can market. For our United States marketplace, in 2020 we generated 63.4 million connections and 38.3 million leads, compared with 65.3 million connections and 38.5 million leads in 2019. We define (i) connections as interactions between consumers and dealers via our marketplace through phone calls, email, managed text and chat, and clicks to access the dealer’s website and map directions to the dealership and (ii) leads as user inquiries via our marketplace to dealers by phone calls, email, or managed text and chat.

Proprietary Search Algorithms and Data‑Driven Approach.  We have built an extensive repository of data on cars, prices, dealers, and the interactions between consumers and dealers that is the result of many years of data aggregation and regression modeling. Our proprietary search algorithms and data analytics allow us to use this valuable data to bring greater transparency to our platform. The primary product of this analysis is our determination of a used car’s IMV, which, together with Dealer Rating, drives our Deal Rating. We calculate IMV by applying more than 20 ranking signals and more than 100 normalization rules to tens of millions of data points, including the make, model, trim, year, features, condition, history, geographic location, and mileage of the car. We apply the knowledge gained from analyzing the substantial volume of connections between consumers and dealers on our platform to build new features for our consumers and products for our dealers.

Strong Value Proposition to Dealers.  We believe that our marketplace offers an efficient customer acquisition channel for dealers, helping them achieve attractive returns on their marketing spend with us. We provide our dealer base with connections to prospective car buyers; most of these connections have historically been for used cars. The primary objective of our traffic acquisition and site improvements is to generate greater volumes of consumer leads to our dealers. These leads include phone calls, email, and managed text and chat interactions for dealers, which we believe yield the highest value engagement for dealers. We provide all dealers with tools that are informed by real‑time market conditions that help them merchandise and sell their cars, and our paying dealers get access to additional valuable information from our Pricing Tool and Market Analysis tool. Our strong value proposition to the dealer community is evidenced by our 6% growth in quarterly average revenue per subscribing dealer, or QARSD, in the United States in the fourth quarter of 2020 compared to the fourth quarter of 2019.

Network Effects Driven by Scale.  With the majority of dealers in the United States listing inventory on our platform and having built the most visited online automotive marketplace in the United States, we believe that our scale creates powerful network effects that reinforce the competitive strength of our business model. Our large consumer audience increases our appeal to dealers and incentivizes more dealers to subscribe to our paid Listings packages to access the numerous benefits unavailable to non‑paying dealers. Displaying listings from more paying dealers on our websites provides consumers with more dealer information and methods to contact those dealers. More consumers and connections drive greater value and a higher return to paying dealers’ marketing spend on our platform. Driven by these network effects, we continue to amass data points, which we use to further strengthen our traffic acquisition efforts and marketplace search algorithms, the utility of analysis complementing each listing, the quality of our user experience, the value of connections between consumers and dealers, and the efficacy of our dealer digital marketing products. 

Attractive Financial Model.  We have a strong track record of revenue growth, profitability, and capital efficiency. We generated revenue of $551.5 million in 2020, $588.9 million in 2019, and $454.1 million in 2018, representing a year-over-year decline of 6% in 2020 – which we primarily attribute to the approximately $50 million impact of fee reductions that we provided to our paying dealers during the second quarter of 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic – and a year-over-year increase of 30% in 2019. A significant portion of our revenue is recurring due to the subscription nature of our products, including from our Listings packages and our Dealer Display advertising and audience targeting products. Furthermore, our revenue base is highly diversified due to the fragmented nature of the automotive dealer industry. We also have been able to grow and invest in our future growth while improving profitability due to the operating leverage in our business model. On a consolidated basis, while our revenue declined 6% in 2020 and grew 30% in 2019, our Adjusted EBITDA grew 109% in 2020 and 55% in 2019. As a percentage of revenue, our Adjusted EBITDA margin expanded to 29% in 2020 from 13% in 2019 and from 11% in 2018. In the United States, which is our most developed market, while our revenue declined by 6% in 2020 and grew by 27% in 2019, we increased our income from operations to $120.8 million in 2020 from $73.9 million in 2019 and $58.4 million in 2018.

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Experienced Management Team with Culture of Innovation.  Our founder, Executive Chairman and Chairman of our Board of Directors, Langley Steinert, co‑founded and was previously chairman of TripAdvisor, an online marketplace for travel‑related content based on the mission of using technology and a data‑driven approach to provide transparency for consumers’ travel planning. Led by Mr. Steinert and a management team with extensive experience guiding technology companies in evolving industries – including Jason Trevisan, our Chief Executive Officer and Sam Zales, our President and Chief Operating Officer – we bring the same commitment to fostering a culture of innovation and delivering data-driven transparency to the automotive market.

Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on our Business

The outbreak in 2020 of the novel strain of coronavirus that surfaced in Wuhan, China in December 2019 and was subsequently declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization, or COVID-19, resulted in a global slowdown of economic activity including worldwide travel restrictions, prohibitions of non-essential work activities, disruption and shutdown of businesses and uncertainty in global financial markets, all of which resulted in the COVID-19 pandemic having an impact on our financial performance in fiscal year 2020. As the COVID-19 pandemic endures and continues to have an impact on global economic activity, the extent to which the COVID-19 pandemic will adversely impact our future business operations, financial performance and results of operations is uncertain and will depend on many factors outside of our control. For a further discussion of the risks, uncertainties and actions taken in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, refer to Item 1A “Risk Factors” and Item 7 “Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations”.

Our Products

Consumer Marketplace

We provide consumers an online automotive marketplace where they can search for new and used car listings from our dealers. With our U.S. marketplace’s peer-to-peer offering, consumers also have access to additional car listings from private sellers, and are able to sell their car to other consumers. Through our marketplace, we provide consumers with information that helps them find the most relevant car for their needs. A user accesses our marketplace through our websites or by using our mobile applications. Most users specify whether they are searching for used, certified pre‑owned, or new cars and then provide their desired vehicle make and model and their postal code. Our product offerings described below are available through the U.S. CarGurus marketplace; their availability on our other marketplaces varies. We also offer paid listings subscriptions for dealers and display advertising products through the PistonHeads website, as well as paid listings subscriptions for dealers through the Autolist website.

Used and Certified Pre‑Owned Cars

Using our proprietary search algorithms, we immediately display the results of the consumer’s search, ranked by Deal Rating, on a search results page, or SRP. Eligible used car listings in our marketplace are assigned one of five Deal Ratings: Great Deal, Good Deal, Fair Deal, High Priced, or Overpriced. A Deal Rating illustrates how competitive a listing is compared to similar cars sold in the same region in recent history. A listing’s Deal Rating is based primarily upon the IMV of the vehicle and the Dealer Rating of the dealer.

Instant Market Value.  IMV is a proprietary algorithm that assesses the market value of a used vehicle in a local market and is a key input for determining a vehicle’s Deal Rating. The IMV algorithm is the product of many years of regression modeling utilizing tens of millions of used car data points. IMV takes into account a number of factors, including comparable currently listed and previously sold used cars in the local market and vehicle details including make, model, trim, year, features, condition, history, and mileage. Our algorithm uses more than 20 ranking signals and more than 100 normalization rules that distill unstructured data from hundreds of sources across thousands of dealers.

Dealer Ratings.  Dealer Ratings are derived from user‑generated content from our users’ experiences with dealers with which they have connected. To promote high‑quality reviews, we require that a user have interacted with the dealer via our marketplace to submit a review. We believe this requirement, together with additional qualification standards, results in a more valuable Dealer Rating. Dealer Rating is an important component of a listing’s Deal Rating and as a result can impact the organic search position of a listing.

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Search Results Page.  In addition to each car’s Deal Rating, our SRP provides users with other useful information, including the difference between the listing price and the IMV that we have determined for the car, mileage, Dealer Rating, and dealer location for paying dealers. We provide in‑depth search filters, including price, year, mileage, trim, color, options, condition, body style, miles per gallon, seating capacity, vehicle ownership history, usage history, seller type, and days on market, among others, which we believe deliver the most comprehensive search capability among major U.S. online automotive marketplaces. We also provide our users with additional features to aid their search, including similar vehicle recommendations, side‑by‑side vehicle comparisons, expert reviews, and user rankings. Our platform also gives users the ability to save searches and receive alerts that keep them informed of relevant developments in the market, including newly available inventory and price changes to cars they are monitoring.

Vehicle Detail Page.  If a user clicks on one of the listings on the SRP, the user is taken to that listing’s vehicle detail page, or VDP. VDPs are designed to provide numerous photos and a comprehensive description of the vehicle, dealer name, address, and dealership information for paying dealers, detailed dealer reviews, methods to contact the dealer, payment calculators, and helpful information about the vehicle, including:

New Cars

Search results for new car listings are sorted by price of inventory matching the user’s search, with the lowest priced listings sorted first. Our new car VDPs include our Dealer Rating and many of the other features of our used car listings, such as Price History and Time on Site. Deal Rating is not applicable to new car listings because it utilizes data not relevant to new cars. Instead, we analyze data on manufacturers’ suggested retail prices, or MSRPs, and recent sales of similar new vehicles, accounting for trade-ins, incentives, and other factors that can affect the price of a new car, to provide users with comparative price information.

Sell My Car

We also allow our consumers to list their cars in our peer-to-peer marketplace in the United States. Our Sell My Car offering enables individual car owners to easily merchandise their vehicles, determine an appropriate selling price with our proprietary price guidance, and manage their listings and communications with prospective buyers from our audience. We collect a fee when the seller lists a vehicle on the peer-to-peer marketplace.

Autolist

Autolist provides consumers an online automotive marketplace through mobile applications on iOS and Android phones, as well as a website. The platform includes inventory from top automotive dealers across the U.S. and gives consumers quick access to manage their search on the go with real-time alerts of newly available inventory and changes that occur on cars and saved searches they have configured. An independent editorial staff produces content to keep consumers informed on the latest vehicles and trends in the automotive market.

PistonHeads

PistonHeads is a U.K. automotive marketplace, forum, and editorial site geared towards automotive enthusiasts. The platform allows consumers to search across a broad range of dealer and private seller listings, engage with other automotive enthusiasts through forums, and stay informed about automotive news through editorial articles and expert reviews.

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Dealer Marketplace

Listings

Our marketplace connects dealers to a large audience of informed and engaged consumers. We offer multiple types of marketplace Listings subscriptions to dealers through the CarGurus U.S. platform (availability varies on our other marketplaces): Restricted Listings, which is free, and various levels of Listings packages, each of which requires a paid subscription. We price our paid Listings packages as a monthly, quarterly, semiannual, or annual subscription based on the dealer’s inventory size, region, and our assessment of the return on investment, or ROI, our solution will provide them.

Dealer Dashboard and Merchandising Tools

All dealers with inventory on CarGurus may access the following Dealer Dashboard features and merchandising tools:

Dealers subscribing to a paid Listings package also have access to the following additional features and tools:

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Digital Marketing Products

We offer dealers subscribing to one of our Enhanced, Featured or Featured Priority Listings packages access to additional advertising products marketed primarily under our RPM suite. With RPM, dealers can reach our large and engaged automotive shopping audience through display advertising that appears in our CarGurus marketplace, on other sites on the internet, and/or on Facebook, a high-converting social platform. RPM helps dealers build brand awareness and acquire customers to their website and dealership. Advertisements can be targeted by the user’s geography, search history, CarGurus website activity (including showing users relevant vehicles from a subscribing dealer’s inventory that they have not yet discovered on our marketplace), and a number of other targeting factors. This product suite allows dealers to increase their visibility with in-market consumers and drive qualified traffic to their websites.

Pricing and Packaging

CarGurus’ core offering is our Listings product suite, which offers a tiered set of packages. Listings are priced in a fixed monthly subscription fee that is based on the connection performance and ROI we expect to deliver for each dealer type, including factors such as location, inventory size and vehicle type. For improved performance, dealers can purchase higher Listings suite levels and add-ons available at an existing Listings suite level. Dealers may be renewed at higher rates commensurate with growth and updated performance expectations. RPM is also packaged in a tiered solution, and priced as a percentage of Listings while accounting for factors such as dealership characteristics and performance expectations.

Auto Manufacturer and Other Advertiser Products

Our platform offers auto manufacturers and others the ability to purchase display advertising on our sites to execute targeted marketing strategies:

Digital Retail and Consumer Finance

In recent years, both consumer demand and dealer receptiveness to digital retail has increased, as consumers have become more comfortable transacting some or all of their car buying process online. We are focused on addressing the needs of both consumers and dealers in this growing segment of automotive digital retail.

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Consumer Finance

Through our partnerships with automotive lending companies, we allow eligible consumers on our U.S. website to pre-qualify for financing on cars from dealerships that offer financing from these partners. We primarily generate revenue from these partnerships based on the number of funded loans from consumers who pre-qualify with our lending partners through our site. We believe this program both provides more transparency to car shoppers about actual payments to be offered at the dealership specific to participating lenders, as well as delivers highly qualified car shopper leads to participating dealers.

Digital Retail

We continue to offer consumers the ability to transact additional elements of their car buying experience through our websites as they seek to complete more of this process online. For example, our shoppers can ‘start purchase’ from a VDP on eligible listings and utilize purchase options, including but not limited to estimating a car’s trade-in value, deciding payment options, and selecting finance and insurance products. Additionally, to address the unique circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic, we offer dealerships the ability to merchandise to consumers contactless service options, such as free home delivery or contactless purchase.

Wholesale

As the automotive industry continues to move further online, it has become even more important for dealers not only to sell their vehicles effectively at retail, but also to acquire the right inventory in the first place via wholesale transactions. In recent years, wholesale vehicle sales have begun shifting online and those trends have accelerated as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The traditional in-person physical auction model is being supplanted with online transactions that are easier, faster, and reduce the effect of geographic constraints.

During 2020, we conducted a pilot of our CarGurus Offers product that enabled dealers to purchase inventory directly from consumers who visited our site. The consumer entered their vehicle information on the Sell My Car page, and we helped facilitate the transaction with the buying dealer. We collected a transaction fee from the dealer for this service.

In January 2021, we completed our acquisition of a 51% ownership interest in CarOffer, LLC, or CarOffer. CarOffer is a modern-day automotive inventory transaction platform that allows dealers and dealer groups to buy, sell, and trade with automation and ease. The acquisition adds wholesale vehicle acquisition and selling capabilities to our portfolio of dealer offerings, creating a powerful new digital solution for dealers to sell and acquire vehicles at both retail and wholesale.

International

We also facilitate high-intent consumers to engage with automotive dealers in both Canada and the U.K. Like our U.S. offerings, CarGurus provides consumers in Canada and the U.K. with a transparent shopping experience, using our proprietary algorithms to determine market specific valuations for vehicles, and ordinating our organic search results based on Deal Ratings.

In Canada, CarGurus is a leading automotive marketplace that provides consumers a transparent shopping experience whether they are looking for a new or used car. In the U.K., CarGurus is a leading marketplace for dealers’ listings of used vehicles, providing consumers with one of the broadest selections of inventory in the U.K. We also provide automotive shoppers rich expert review content, an active forum for automotive discussion, and offer privately owned inventory through the PistonHeads website.

Marketing and Brand

Consumer Marketing

CarGurus is the most visited online automotive marketplace in the United States, with more than 90.9 million and 36.2 million average monthly sessions and unique users, respectively in 2020. We have built our audience on the strength of our user experience, and remain focused on delivering an industry-leading consumer marketplace. Our intuitive search experience, combined with the largest inventory of any major U.S. online automotive marketplace and relevant content, updates, and tools provide unparalleled transparency and decision-support to consumers during their car search to help them buy with confidence. The strength of our consumer experience is one of our most powerful marketing tools, with “word of mouth” representing the second-most cited influence on consumers decision to visit CarGurus despite our substantial investments in paid marketing. This leading consumer experience also enables CarGurus to perform very well with search engines, generating a significant volume of free traffic from high-intent car shoppers.

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A key pillar of our consumer marketing efforts is what we call algorithmic traffic acquisition. We employ a team of strategists, engineers and data scientists that optimizes our user acquisition through search engines, social media, and other digital marketing channels and has tested over one billion keywords on various search engines as well as sophisticated, personalized remarketing, to nurture consumers toward finding their right car. The sophistication of our data-driven algorithmic traffic acquisition continues to advance, with an ongoing focus on increasingly data-driven campaigns that drive high return on advertising spend. We believe our expertise in this area constitutes a competitive advantage over less sophisticated competitors and those who outsource these capabilities.

In parallel with our sophisticated paid and organic traffic acquisition efforts, we invest significant resources in optimizing our site experience and retention marketing efforts through email and app notifications to help consumers find the right car for them and connect with a dealer to make a purchase. Rigorous conversion rate optimization efforts help increase the ROI on our advertising spend. Our increasing focus on merchandising that drives more shoppers to connect with dealers with high subscription expansion opportunity creates a virtuous cycle of improved monetization that allows for reinvestment in further improvements to our consumer experience.

We augment our performance marketing, conversion rate optimization and retention marketing efforts with brand‑building efforts. Our brand marketing efforts comprise investments in media, including television and online video, as well as expressing our unique brand value proposition throughout our core site experience and organic social channels as well as an active public relations program that allows us to gain significant, high-credibility earned media coverage. Despite a shorter tenure and lower investment in brand marketing than our primary competitors, we have made significant progress toward closing our brand awareness gaps since launching brand marketing in 2017 and believe that we are well‑positioned to continue to strengthen our brand by continuing to invest in brand-building efforts and refining the articulation of our unique value proposition. As we close the awareness gap compared to our core competitors, we see significant opportunity to shift our brand focus from reach to driving greater understanding of and preference for our brand, further accelerating the strong consumer engagement and word of mouth benefits we already enjoy.

Dealer Marketing

The primary goals of our dealer marketing initiatives are to acquire dealers not yet in our marketplace, convert non‑paying dealers into paying dealers, retain our existing paying dealers, and increase annual subscription revenues from our paying dealers. Our dealer marketing efforts aim to:

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Sales

Our sales team is responsible for bringing dealers onto our marketplace and converting non-paying dealers to paid subscriptions. We have built an efficient inside sales and account management team of approximately 260 employees worldwide who sell our marketplace products to franchise and independent dealers. We have built a field sales team that works with strategic franchise and national dealership groups in large metropolitan areas in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. In addition, we have advertising sales employees based in the U.S. and Canada.

We have a comprehensive dealer account management process to assist dealers in becoming successful in our marketplace. We assign a Customer Success Associate to every new paying Listings dealer to assist with onboarding and integration with any relevant software systems. The designated Customer Success Associate spends time educating dealers on a range of topics, including effectively using the Dealer Dashboard, tracking sales, and measuring ROI for their marketing spend. After the onboarding period, a Dealer Relations Account Manager is designated to assist the dealer in utilizing our tools and maximizing ROI from our offerings, including effectively pricing vehicles, vehicle merchandising, and keeping inventory up to date with complete vehicle information. We believe our active communication with our dealers fosters customer satisfaction and increases customer retention.

People and Talent

Our investment in our greatest asset – our people – is integral to our core values, evidenced by our inclusion of employee engagement, retention and hiring targets as components of our 2020 strategic and organizational initiatives. Our Board of Directors oversees our people and talent efforts and views building our culture – from employee development and retention to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging initiatives – as key to driving long-term value for our business and helping to mitigate risks. In February 2020, we hired our first Chief People Officer to ensure that our employees and culture are prioritized at every level of decision-making.

As of December 31, 2020, we had 827 full‑time employees, 74 of whom were based outside the United States. None of our employees is represented by a labor union or covered by a collective bargaining agreement.

Culture, Values and Standards

Our company culture has developed out of our data‑driven and innovative approach to the automotive market. We leverage data to drive innovation across all facets of our business and continuously optimize our products and processes to serve our consumers, dealers, advertisers, and partners. Our approach emphasizes original thought, impact, and collaboration across our organization, and we recognize and award employees who drive positive results across these constituencies. We invest in creating a work environment that facilitates partnership among our employees and promotes diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. In that spirit, we have identified our core values as follows:

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Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging and Equal Employment Policy

We are an equal opportunity employer and strive to build and nurture a culture where inclusiveness is a reflex, not an initiative. With support from our Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging Advisory Team, we are committed to fostering diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, as well as building a workplace where everyone can thrive.  Our commitment to these principles helps us attract and retain the best talent, enables employees to realize their full potential and drives high performance through innovation and collaboration. In 2020, with respect to employees who chose to self-identify, we increased our female workforce in the U.S. from 30.9% to 32.3%. We saw increases in our female workforce at almost every level in the U.S., including technical and senior management roles. We also increased our representation of all underrepresented racial minorities in the U.S. from 23.3% to 25.9%.

Compensation and Benefits

The success of our business is fundamentally connected to the well-being of our people. Accordingly, we provide our eligible employees with competitive wages and access to flexible and convenient medical programs intended to meet their needs and the needs of their families. In addition to standard medical coverage, we offer the following benefits to our U.S. employees (availability internationally varies): dental and vision coverage, health savings and flexible spending accounts, paid time off, flexible work schedules on a case-by-case basis, employee assistance programs, short term and long term disability insurance and term life insurance, as well as paid access to certain family care resources. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we implemented changes that we determined were in the best interest of our employees, as well as the communities in which we operate, and which comply with government regulations. These changes included requiring our employees to work from home for several months.

Employee Engagement

In order to ensure that we are meeting our people and talent objectives we conduct an employee engagement survey at least annually to help our management team gain insight into and gauge employees’ feelings, attitudes, and behaviors around working at CarGurus. Our latest survey, completed in December 2020, had a participation rate of over 87% of our employees worldwide and the survey results indicated that we excel in areas including manager empathy, alignment to company goals and belonging. Based on employee feedback, we also identified certain company-wide focus areas, including with respect to improving the resources and benefits we can provide for our employees as they continue to work outside of our offices during the COVID-19 pandemic, which we agree is important to our long-term success. Our culture has led to strong employee satisfaction and pride that has been recognized across the globe, as evidenced with the following awards: Built In Boston’s “Best Places to Work” in 2019, 2020 and 2021; the Mass TLC “Tech Top 50” Company Culture in 2020; Fortune’s “Best Places to Work” in 2019; Computerworld’s “Best Places to Work in IT” in 2019 and 2020; Boston Business Journal’s “Best Places to Work” for five years in a row from 2015 to 2019; and Boston Globe’s “Top Place to Work” in 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2018.

Training and Development

Our people and talent strategy is essential for our ability to continue to develop and market innovative products and customer solutions. We continually invest in our employees’ career growth and provide employees with a wide range of development opportunities, including face-to-face, virtual, social and self-directed learning, mentoring, coaching, and external development. In 2020, more than 96% of our employees participated in learning and development activities worldwide.

Technology and Product Development

We are a technology company focused on innovative, actionable data analysis. We design our mobile and web products to create a transparent experience for both consumers and dealers. We believe in rapid development, release frequent updates and have internal tools and automation that allow us to efficiently evolve our products. Our software is built using a combination of internally developed software, third‑party software and services, and open source software.

Our Search Technology

Our search and ranking technology is served by a proprietary in‑memory search index solution that is scalable, fast, and extensible. We have highly flexible interfaces that allow dealers to automatically add their inventory to our index, enabling us to quickly integrate hundreds of inventory sources with minimal effort and easily support inventory growth.

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Our Mobile Technology

We have designed our marketplace to appeal to mobile users by developing our products with a mobile‑first mindset. All of our search results pages use a single‑page application type approach to eliminate page reloads and improve responsiveness. We also use techniques to load content onto a user’s mobile device more efficiently.

Our Integrations

We make available several application program interfaces and web widgets that integrate with customer relationship management and inventory management solutions, among other platforms. These integrations allow dealers to incorporate designated data and tools into the fabric of their marketing and customer engagement strategies. For example, our Deal Rating Badges are used on dealer websites, which show our Deal Rating for cars that have been rated as a Great Deal, Good Deal, or Fair Deal. Our Deal Rating serves as trusted, third‑party validation on dealer websites.

Infrastructure

Our development servers and U.S. and Canadian websites are hosted at third-party data centers near Boston, Massachusetts, as well as through third-party cloud services in the U.S. Our European websites are hosted on third-party cloud computing services near each of London, England and Dublin, Ireland. We use third-party content distribution networks to cache and serve many portions of our sites at locations across the globe. We monitor and test at the application, host, network, and full site levels to maintain availability and promote performance. We use third-party cloud computing services for many data processing jobs and backup/recovery services.

Competition

We face competition to attract consumers and paying dealers to our marketplaces and services and to attract advertisers to purchase our advertising products and services. Our competitors offer various marketplaces, products, and services that compete with us. Some of these competitors include:

Competition for Consumers and Dealers

We compete for consumer visits with other online automotive marketplaces, free listing services, general search engines, and dealers’ websites. We compete for consumers primarily on the basis of the quality of the consumer experience. We believe we compete favorably on user experience due to the number of our vehicle listings, the transparency of the information we provide on cars, prices, and dealers, the intuitive nature of our user interface, and our mobile user experience, among other factors.

We compete for dealers’ marketing spend with offline customer acquisition channels, other online automotive marketplaces, dealers’ own customer acquisition efforts on search engines and social media marketplaces, and other internet sites that attract consumers searching for vehicles. We compete primarily on the basis of the ROI that our marketplace provides. We believe we compete favorably due to our large user audience, high user engagement, and the volume and quality of connections we provide to well‑informed consumers, which results in an attractive ROI for dealers.

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Competition for Advertisers

We compete for a share of advertisers’ total marketing budgets against media sites, websites dedicated to helping consumers shop for cars, major internet portals, search engines, and social media sites, among others. We also compete for a share of advertisers’ overall marketing budgets with traditional media, such as television, radio, magazines, newspapers, automotive publications, billboards, and other offline advertising channels. We compete for advertising spend based on the marketing ROI that our marketplace provides. We believe we compete favorably due to our large user audience size, high user engagement, and the effectiveness and relevance of our advertising products.

Intellectual Property

We protect our intellectual property through a combination of patents, copyrights, trademarks, service marks, domain names, trade secret protections, confidentiality procedures, and contractual restrictions.

We have one issued U.S. patent with an expiration date of May 2034, two pending U.S. patent applications, and one pending international patent application. These applications cover proprietary technology that relates to various functionalities on our platform, generally in connection with pricing, ranking and detecting fraud in online listings. We intend to pursue additional patent protection to the extent we believe it would be beneficial to our competitive position.

We have a number of registered and unregistered trademarks, including “CarGurus,” the CarGurus logo, the CG logo, and related marks, which we have registered as trademarks in the U.S. and certain other jurisdictions. We pursue additional trademark registrations to the extent we believe doing so would be beneficial to our competitive position. Our registered trademarks remain enforceable in the countries in which they are registered for as long as we continue to use the marks, and pay the fees to maintain the registrations, in those countries.

We are the registered holder of several domestic and international domain names that include “CarGurus” and variations of our trade names.

In addition to the protection provided by our intellectual property rights, we enter into confidentiality and proprietary rights agreements with our employees and relevant consultants, contractors, and business partners. We control the use of our proprietary technology and intellectual property through provisions in contracts with our customers and partners and our general and product-specific terms of use on our websites.

Regulatory

Various aspects of our business are, may become, or may be viewed by regulators from time to time as subject, directly or indirectly, to U.S. federal, state, local and foreign laws and regulations. In particular, the advertising and sale of new or used motor vehicles is highly regulated by the states and jurisdictions in which we do business. Although we do not sell motor vehicles and we believe that vehicle listings on our sites are not themselves advertisements, regulatory authorities or third parties could take the position that some of the laws or regulations applicable to dealers or to the manner in which motor vehicles are advertised and sold generally are directly applicable to our business. These advertising laws and regulations, which often originated decades before the emergence of the internet, are frequently subject to multiple interpretations, are not uniform across jurisdictions, sometimes impose inconsistent requirements with respect to new or used motor vehicles, and the manner in which they should be applied to our business model is not always clear. Regulators or other third parties could take, and on some occasions have taken, the position that our marketplace or related products violate applicable brokering, bird‑dog, consumer protection, or advertising laws or regulations.

In order to operate in this regulated environment, we develop our products and services with a view toward appropriately managing the risk that our regulatory compliance, or the regulatory compliance of the dealers whose inventory is listed on our websites, could be challenged.

We consider applicable advertising and consumer protection laws and regulations in designing our products and services. With respect to paid advertising, other than Featured Listings, Featured Priority Listings and Dealer Display advertising and audience targeting products marketed under our Real-time Performance Marketing suite, we believe that most of the content displayed on the websites we operate does not constitute paid advertising for the sale of motor vehicles. Nevertheless, we endeavor to design our website content in a manner that would comply with relevant advertising regulations and consumer protection laws if, and to the extent that, the content is considered to be vehicle sales advertising.

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Our websites and mobile applications enable us, dealers, and users to send and receive text messages and other mobile phone communications, which requires us to comply with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, or TCPA, in the U.S.  The TCPA, as interpreted and implemented by the Federal Communications Commission, or the FCC, and federal and state courts, imposes significant restrictions on utilization of telephone calls and text messages to residential and mobile telephone numbers as a means of communication, particularly when the prior express consent of the person being contacted has not been obtained.  

In addition, we are subject to numerous federal, national, state, and local laws and regulations in the United States and around the world regarding privacy and the collection, processing, storage, sharing, disclosure, use, cross-border transfer, and protection of personal information and other data.  While the scope of these laws and regulations is changing and remains subject to differing interpretations, we seek to comply with industry standards and all applicable laws, policies, legal obligations, and industry codes of conduct relating to privacy and data protection.  We are also subject to the terms of our privacy policies and privacy-related obligations to third parties.  

Corporate Information

We were originally organized on November 10, 2005 as a Massachusetts limited liability company under the name “Nimalex LLC.” Effective July 15, 2006, we changed our name to “CarGurus LLC.” On June 26, 2015, we converted from a Delaware limited liability company into a Delaware corporation and changed our name to “CarGurus, Inc.”

Our principal executive offices are located at 2 Canal Park, 4th Floor, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02141, and our telephone number is (617) 354-0068. Our U.S. website is www.cargurus.com.

CarGurus, the CarGurus logo, and other trademarks or service marks of CarGurus appearing in this Annual Report on Form 10-K are the property of CarGurus, Inc. Trade names, trademarks, and service marks of other companies appearing in this Annual Report on Form 10-K are the property of their respective holders. We have omitted the ® and ™ designations, as applicable, for the trademarks used in this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

Additional Information

The following filings are available on our investor relations website after we file them with the Securities and Exchange Commission, or the SEC: Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and Proxy Statements for our annual meetings of stockholders.  These filings are also available for download free of charge on our investor relations website. Our investor relations website is located at http://investors.cargurus.com.  

We webcast our earnings calls and certain events that we participate in or host with members of the investment community on our investor relations website.  Additionally, we provide news and announcements regarding our financial performance, including SEC filings, investor events, press and earnings releases, on our investor relations website.  Corporate governance information, including our policies concerning business conduct and ethics, is also available on our investor relations website under the heading “Governance.” No content from any of our websites is intended to be incorporated by reference into this Annual Report on Form 10-K or in any other report or document we file with the SEC, and any reference to our websites is intended to be an inactive textual reference only.

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Item 1A. Risk Factors.

Investing in our Class A common stock involves a high degree of risk. You should carefully consider the risks and uncertainties described below, together with all of the other information contained in this Annual Report on Form 10-K, including “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” and our consolidated financial statements and related notes, before evaluating our business. Our business, financial condition, operating results, cash flow, and prospects could be materially and adversely affected by any of these risks or uncertainties. In that event, the trading price of our Class A common stock could decline. See “Special Note Regarding Forward‑Looking Statements.”

Risks Related to Our Business and Industry

Our business has been, and we expect it to continue to be, adversely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an international health crisis and resulted in significant disruptions to the global economy as well as businesses and capital markets around the world. Our operations have been materially adversely affected by a range of factors related to the COVID-19 pandemic. In March, we closed all of our offices and began requiring our employees to work remotely until further notice, which has disrupted and may continue to disrupt how we operate our business. In addition, in an effort to limit the spread of COVID-19, many countries, as well as states and localities in the United States, implemented or mandated and continue to implement or mandate significant restrictions on travel and commerce, shelter-in-place or stay-at-home orders, and business closures. Fluctuation in infection rates in the regions in which we operate has resulted in periodic changes in restrictions that vary from region to region and may require rapid response to new or reinstated orders. Many of these orders resulted in, and may continue to result in, restrictions on the ability of consumers to buy and sell automobiles by restricting operations at dealerships and/or by closing or reducing the services provided by certain service providers upon which dealerships rely. In addition, these restrictions and continued concern about the spread of the disease have impacted car shopping by consumers and disrupted the operations of car dealerships, which has adversely affected and may continue to adversely affect the market for automobile purchases.  

The automotive industry is also facing inventory supply problems, especially for used vehicles. The industry has experienced, and may continue to experience, a decline in used-car inventory for a number of reasons attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic, including: (i) fewer trade-ins from diminished vehicle sales; (ii) lease extensions on vehicles that consumers would have otherwise returned to the dealership; and (iii) the closure of or restrictions on the operations of wholesale auctions limiting dealers’ ability to source stock and/or replenish inventory. Further, these auction closures and the limited supply of inventory have led to an increase in bids per vehicle and corresponding increases to wholesale auction prices. As the price of replenishing inventory through wholesale auctions has increased, dealers have increased, and may continue to increase, the prices they charge consumers. A high volume of price increases on vehicle sales at a rapid rate could impact our proprietary Instant Market Values, or IMV, and distribution of Deal Ratings. In addition, if our paying dealers continue to operate at reduced inventory levels or with increased costs, they may reduce or be unwilling to increase their advertising spend with us and/or may terminate their subscriptions at the conclusion of the committed term. Our ability to add new paying dealers or increase our fees with dealers may be impeded if dealers perceive they have less of a need for our products and services because of their limited inventory. Inventory challenges in the automotive industry have adversely impacted, and could continue to adversely impact, the amount of inventory on our websites, which could contribute to a decline in the number of consumer visits to our websites and/or the number of connections between consumers and dealers through our marketplaces. These inventory-related issues resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic may materially and adversely impact our business, financial condition and results of operations.

As a result of the travel and commerce restrictions and the impact on their businesses, a number of our dealer customers temporarily closed or are operating on a reduced capacity, and many dealerships are facing significant financial challenges. Such closures and circumstances led some paying dealers to cancel their subscriptions and/or reduce their spending with us, which has had and may continue to have a material adverse effect on our revenues and on our business. Additionally, in response to the increasing cancelations and the drop in consumer demand at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we reduced our spending on brand advertising and traffic acquisition, which resulted in fewer consumers using our platform during the year ended December 31, 2020, which in turn has, and may continue to, materially and adversely affect our business. While we have since restored a portion of that historical consumer spend, we may not in the future fully restore prior spending levels if we elect to redirect our investments elsewhere, including in favor of new product development. If such a strategy were not to result in the benefits that we expect, our business could be harmed. Our business relies on the ability of consumers to borrow funds to acquire automobiles and banks and other financing companies may limit or restrict lending to consumers as a result of the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, which may also materially and adversely affect our business.

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Further, because of the significant financial challenges that dealerships have faced and continue to face as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, we took measures to help our paying dealers maintain their business health during the COVID-19 pandemic. We proactively reduced the subscription fees for paying dealers by at least 50% on all marketplace subscriptions for the April and May 2020 service periods, as well as provided a fee reduction on all June 2020 marketplace subscriptions of 20% for paying dealers in the United States and Canada and 50% for paying dealers in the United Kingdom. As a result, the level of fees we received from paying dealers materially decreased during the year ended December 31, 2020, resulting in a material decline in our revenue and a material adverse effect to our business. In addition, despite our proactive fee reductions during the second quarter of 2020, we experienced increased customer cancellation rates and slowed paying dealer additions during such period, which materially and adversely affected our business for the year ended December 31, 2020. During the December 2020 and February 2021 service periods, we also waived marketplace subscription fees for paying dealers in the United Kingdom impacted by additional national lockdowns. We may again in the future experience slowed paying dealer additions and as a result may decide to re-institute further billings relief as we continue to assess the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on our paying dealers and business operations. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we have also experienced, and may continue to experience, increased account delinquencies from dealer customers challenged by the COVID-19 pandemic that failed to pay us on time or at all.

These effects from the COVID-19 pandemic on our revenue caused us to implement certain cost-savings measures across our business, which have disrupted, and may continue to disrupt, our business and operations. For example, during the second quarter of 2020, we initiated a cost-savings initiative that included a reduction in our workforce, a limitation in discretionary spend across our business and our ceasing of certain international operations and expansion efforts. We also reduced consumer marketing across both algorithmic traffic acquisition and brand spend during the year ended December 31, 2020 in comparison to the prior year in an effort to reduce expenses and as a result of suppressed dealer inventory and resulting reduced demand for leads from dealers. Despite these measures, we may not achieve the costs savings or attract consumer visits at the levels we expect, which would adversely impact our cash flows and financial condition. These expense reduction activities, and any future cost savings actions that we may take, may yield unintended consequences, such as loss of key employees, undesired attrition, and the risk that we may not achieve the anticipated cost savings at the levels we expect, any of which may have a material adverse effect on our results of operations and/or financial condition. If the COVID-19 pandemic materially impacts our revenues in the future, we may also decide that additional disruptive measures are necessary to reduce our operating expenses.

The global nature of the COVID-19 pandemic has also had, and will continue to have, a significant impact on our international businesses. The crisis has halted our growth in existing markets and our expansion into additional markets. In particular, we ceased marketplace operations in Germany, Italy, and Spain, and halted any new international expansion efforts, which we believe will allow us to focus our financial and human capital resources on our more established international markets in Canada and the United Kingdom. Failure by us to succeed in these two markets, however, would materially and adversely affect our business and potential growth.

We continue to monitor and assess the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on our commercial operations, including the impact on our revenue. However, we cannot at this time accurately predict what effects these conditions will ultimately have on our operations due to uncertainties relating to the duration of the pandemic, the extent and effectiveness of governmental responses and other preventative, treatment and containment actions or developments, including the distribution of recently approved vaccines, shifts in behavior going forward, and the length or severity of the travel and commerce restrictions imposed by relevant governmental authorities. Nor can we predict the adverse impact on the global economies and financial markets in which we operate, which may have a significant negative impact on our business, financial condition and results of operations.

Our business is substantially dependent on our relationships with dealers. If a significant number of dealers terminate their subscription agreements with us, our business and financial results would be materially and adversely affected.

Our primary source of revenue consists of subscription fees paid to us by dealers for access to enhanced features on our automotive marketplaces. Our subscription agreements with dealers generally may be terminated by us with 30 days’ notice and by dealers with 30 days’ notice at the end of the committed term. The majority of our contracts with dealers currently provide for one-month committed terms and do not contain contractual obligations requiring a dealer to maintain its relationship with us beyond the committed term. Accordingly, these dealers may cancel their subscriptions with us in accordance with the terms of their subscription agreements. A dealer’s decision to cancel its subscription with us may be influenced by several factors, including national and regional dealership associations, national and local regulators, automotive manufacturers, consumer groups, and consolidated dealer groups. If any of these influential groups indicate that dealers should not enter into or maintain subscription agreements with us, this belief could become shared by dealers and we may lose a number of our paying dealers. If a significant number of our paying dealers terminate their subscriptions with us, our business and financial results would be materially and adversely affected.

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If we fail to maintain or increase the number of dealers that pay subscription fees to us, or fail to maintain or increase the fees paid to us for subscriptions, our business and financial results would be materially and adversely affected.

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many paying dealers cancelled their subscriptions with us (including, in some cases, with our permission prior to the end of the applicable contract term and notice period), which has caused a material adverse impact on our revenues, and it is possible that additional dealers will cancel their subscriptions as they continue to experience the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. If paying dealers do not receive the volume of consumer connections that they expect during their subscription period, do not experience the level of car sales they expect from those connections, or fail to attribute consumer connections or sales to our platform, they may terminate their subscriptions at the conclusion of the committed term. If we fail to maintain or expand our base of paying dealers or fail to maintain or increase the level of fees that we receive from them, our business and financial results would be materially and adversely affected.

We allow dealers to list their inventory in CarGurus marketplaces for free; however, we impose certain limitations on such free listings, such as capping the number of leads that non-paying dealers in the U.S. may receive within a 30-day period, not displaying non-paying dealer identity and contact information, and prohibiting access to the paid features of our marketplaces. We continue to adapt our free listings product, Restricted Listings, in our CarGurus marketplaces and in the future, we may decide to impose additional restrictions on Restricted Listings or modify the services available to non-paying dealers. These changes to our Restricted Listings product may result in less inventory being displayed to consumers, which may impair our efforts to attract consumers, and cause non-paying dealers to receive fewer leads and connections, which may make it more difficult for us to convert such dealers to paying dealers. If dealers do not subscribe to our paid offerings at the rates we expect, our business and financial results would be materially and adversely affected.

If dealers or other advertisers reduce their advertising spending with us and we are unable to replace the reduced advertising spending, our advertising revenue and business would be harmed.

A significant amount of revenue is derived from advertising revenues generated primarily through advertising sales, including display advertising and audience targeting services, to dealers, auto manufacturers, and other auto-related brand advertisers. We compete for this advertising revenue with other online automotive marketplaces and with television, print media, and other traditional advertising channels. Our ability to attract and retain advertisers and to generate advertising revenue depends on a number of factors, including our ability to: increase the number of consumers using our marketplaces; compete effectively for advertising spending with other online automotive marketplaces; continue to develop our advertising products; keep pace with changes in technology and the practices and offerings of our competitors; and offer an attractive ROI to our advertisers for their advertising spend with us.

Our agreements with dealers for display advertising generally include terms ranging from one month to one year and may be terminated by us with 30 days’ notice and by dealers with 30 days’ notice at the end of the committed term. The contracts do not contain contractual obligations requiring an advertiser to maintain its relationship with us beyond the committed term. Certain of our other advertising contracts, including those with auto manufacturers, typically do not have ongoing commitments to advertise in our marketplaces beyond a committed term. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, some advertisers have cancelled or reduced their advertising with us, which has caused a material adverse impact on our revenues, and it is possible that advertising customers will continue to cancel or reduce their advertising with us as they continue to experience the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, a reduction in consumer visits to our sites as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the delivery of fewer impressions for our advertising customers than anticipated during the year ended December 31, 2020, which has caused, and may continue to cause, an adverse impact on our advertising revenues. We may not succeed in capturing a greater share of our advertisers’ spending if we are unable to convince advertisers of the effectiveness or superiority of our advertising services as compared to alternative channels. If current advertisers reduce their advertising spending with us and we are unable to replace such reduced advertising spending, our advertising revenue and business and financial results would be harmed.

If we are unable to provide a compelling vehicle search experience to consumers through our platform, the number of connections between consumers and dealers using our marketplaces may decline and our business and financial results would be materially and adversely affected.

If we fail to continue to provide a compelling vehicle search experience to consumers, the number of connections between consumers and dealers through our marketplaces could decline, which in turn could lead dealers to suspend listing their inventory in our marketplaces, cancel their subscriptions, or reduce their spending with us. If dealers pause or cancel listing their inventory in our marketplaces, we may not be able to attract a large consumer audience, which may cause other dealers to pause or cancel their use of our marketplaces. This reduction in the number of dealers using our marketplaces would likely materially and adversely affect our marketplaces and our business and financial results. As consumers increasingly use their mobile devices to access the internet and our marketplaces, our success depends, in part, on our ability to provide consumers with a robust and user-friendly experience through their mobile devices. We believe that our ability to provide a compelling vehicle search experience, both on desktop computers and through mobile devices, is subject to a

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number of factors, including our ability to: maintain attractive marketplaces for consumers and dealers; continue to innovate and introduce products for our marketplaces; launch new products that are effective and have a high degree of consumer engagement; display a wide variety of automobile inventory to attract more consumers to our websites; provide mobile applications that engage consumers; maintain the compatibility of our mobile applications with operating systems, such as iOS and Android, and with popular mobile devices running such operating systems; and access and analyze a sufficient amount of data to enable us to provide relevant information to consumers, including pricing information and accurate vehicle details.

We rely on internet search engines to drive traffic to our websites, and if we fail to appear prominently in the search results, our traffic would decline and our business would be adversely affected.

We rely, in part, on internet search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo! to drive traffic to our websites. The number of consumers we attract to our marketplaces from search engines is due in part to how and where our websites rank in unpaid search results. These rankings can be affected by a number of factors, many of which are not under our direct control and may change frequently. For example, when a consumer searches for a vehicle in an internet search engine, we rely on a high organic search ranking of our webpages to refer the consumer to our websites. Our competitors’ internet search engine optimization efforts may result in their websites receiving higher search result rankings than ours, or internet search engines could change their methodologies in a way that would adversely affect our search result rankings. If internet search engines modify their methodologies in ways that are detrimental to us, if our efforts to improve our search engine optimization are unsuccessful or less successful than our competitors’ internet search engine optimization efforts, our ability to attract a large consumer audience could diminish and traffic to our marketplaces could decline. In addition, internet search engine providers could provide dealer and pricing information directly in search results, align with our competitors, or choose to develop competing products. Reductions in our own search advertising spend or more aggressive spending by our competitors could also cause us to incur higher advertising costs and/or reduce our market visibility to prospective users. Our websites have experienced fluctuations in organic and paid search result rankings in the past, and we anticipate fluctuations in the future. Any reduction in the number of consumers directed to our websites through internet search engines could harm our business and operating results.

Any inability by us to develop new products, or achieve widespread consumer and dealer adoption of those products, could negatively impact our business and financial results.

Our success depends on our continued innovation to provide products that make our marketplaces, websites, and mobile applications useful for consumers and dealers or that otherwise provide value to consumers and dealers. We anticipate that over time we may reach a point when investments in our current products are less productive and the growth of our revenue will require more focus on developing new products for consumers and dealers. These new products must be widely adopted by consumers and dealers in order for us to continue to attract consumers to our marketplaces and dealers to our products and services. Accordingly, we must continually invest resources in product, technology, and development in order to improve the attractiveness and comprehensiveness of our marketplaces and their related products and effectively incorporate new internet and mobile technologies into them. Our ability to engage in these activities may decline as a result of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and our cost-savings initiatives on our business. These product, technology, and development expenses may include costs of hiring additional personnel, engaging third-party service providers and conducting other research and development activities. In addition, revenue relating to new products is typically unpredictable and our new products may have lower gross margins, lower retention rates, and higher marketing and sales costs than our existing products. We are likely to continue to modify our pricing models for both existing and new products so that our prices for our offerings reflect the value those offerings are providing to consumers and dealers. Our pricing models may not effectively reflect the value of products to dealers, and, if we are unable to provide marketplaces and products that consumers and dealers want to use, they may reduce or cease the use of our marketplaces and products. Without innovative marketplaces and related products, we may be unable to attract additional, unique consumers or retain current consumers, which could affect the number of dealers that become paying dealers and the number of advertisers that want to advertise in our marketplaces, as well as the amounts that they are willing to pay for our products, which could, in turn, negatively impact our business and financial results.

We may be unable to maintain or grow relationships with data providers, or may experience interruptions in the data they provide, which may create a less valuable or transparent shopping experience and negatively affect our business and operating results.

We obtain data from many third-party data providers, including inventory management systems, automotive website providers, customer relationship management systems, dealer management systems, governmental entities, and third-party data licensors. Our business relies on our ability to obtain data for the benefit of consumers and dealers using our marketplaces. For example, our success in each market is dependent in part upon our ability to obtain and maintain inventory data and other vehicle information for those markets. The large amount of inventory and vehicle information available in our marketplaces is critical to the value we provide for consumers. The loss or interruption of such inventory data or other vehicle information could

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decrease the number of consumers using our marketplaces. We could experience interruptions in our data access for a number of reasons, including difficulties in renewing our agreements with data providers, changes to the software used by data providers, efforts by industry participants to restrict access to data, increased fees we may be charged by data providers and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our marketplaces could be negatively affected if any current provider terminates its relationship with us or our service from any provider is interrupted. If there is a material disruption in the data provided to us, the information that we provide to consumers and dealers using our marketplaces may be limited. In addition, the quality, accuracy, and timeliness of this information may suffer, which may lead to a less valuable and less transparent shopping experience for consumers using our marketplaces and could negatively affect our business and operating results.

The failure to build, maintain and protect our brands would harm our ability to attract a large consumer audience and to expand the use of our marketplaces by consumers and dealers.

While we are focused on building our brand recognition, maintaining and enhancing our brands will depend largely on the success of our efforts to maintain the trust of consumers and dealers and to deliver value to each consumer and dealer using our marketplaces. Our ability to protect our brands is also impacted by the success of our efforts to optimize our significant brand spend and overcome the intense competition in brand marketing across our industry, including competitors that may imitate our messaging. In addition, as a result of suppressed dealer inventory and resulting reduced demand for leads by dealers since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we reduced our brand spend and we may decide to continue to suppress our brand spend in the future depending on the continued impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. If consumers believe that we are not focused on providing them with a better automobile shopping experience, or if we fail to overcome brand marketing competition and maintain a differentiated value proposition in consumers’ minds, our reputation and the strength of our brands may be adversely affected.

Complaints or negative publicity about our business practices and culture, our management team and employees, our marketing and advertising campaigns, our compliance with applicable laws and regulations, the integrity of the data that we provide to consumers, data privacy and security issues, and other aspects of our business, irrespective of their validity, could diminish consumers’ and dealers’ confidence and participation in our marketplaces and could adversely affect our brands. There can be no assurance that we will be able to maintain or enhance our brands, and failure to do so would harm our business growth prospects and operating results.

Portions of our platform enable consumers and dealers using our marketplaces to communicate with one another and other persons seeking information or advice on the internet. Claims of defamation or other injury could be made against us for content posted on our websites. In addition, negative publicity and user sentiment generated as a result of fraudulent or deceptive conduct by users of our marketplaces could damage our reputation, reduce our ability to attract new users or retain our current users, and diminish the value of our brands.

Our past growth is not indicative of our future growth, and our ability to grow our revenue in the future is uncertain due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our revenue decreased to $551.5 million for the year ended December 31, 2020 from $588.9 million for the year ended December 31, 2019, representing a 6% decrease between such periods – which we primarily attribute to the approximately $50 million impact of fee reductions that we provided to our paying dealers during the second quarter of 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic – and increased to $588.9 million for the year ended December 31, 2019 from $454.1 million for the year ended December 31, 2018, representing a 30% increase between such periods. Our revenue in 2021 and beyond may continue to be impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, we will not be able to grow as expected, or at all, if we fail to: increase the number of consumers using our marketplaces; maintain and expand the number of dealers that subscribe to our marketplaces and maintain and increase the fees that they are paying; attract and retain advertisers placing advertisements in our marketplaces; further improve the quality of our marketplaces and introduce high quality new products; and increase the number of connections between consumers and dealers using our marketplaces and connections to paying dealers, in particular. If our revenue declines further or fails to grow, investors’ perceptions of our business may be adversely affected, and the market price of our Class A common stock could decline.

We may require additional capital to pursue our business objectives and respond to business opportunities, challenges, or unforeseen circumstances. If we are unable to generate sufficient cash flows or if capital is not available to us, our business, operating results, financial condition, and prospects could be adversely affected.

If we are unable to generate sufficient cash flows, we would require additional capital to pursue our business objectives and respond to business opportunities, challenges, or unforeseen circumstances, including the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as to make marketing expenditures to improve our brand awareness, develop new products, further improve our platform and existing products, enhance our operating infrastructure, and acquire complementary businesses and technologies. Accordingly, we may need to engage in equity or debt financings to secure additional funds. However, additional funds may not be available when we need them on terms that are acceptable to us or at all. Volatility in the credit markets, particularly as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, may also have an adverse effect on our ability to obtain debt financing. If we are unable to obtain adequate financing or financing on terms satisfactory to us when we require it, our ability to continue to pursue our business objectives and to respond to business opportunities, challenges, or unforeseen circumstances could be significantly limited, and our business, operating results, financial condition, and prospects could be adversely affected.

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Our international operations involve risks that may differ from, or are in addition to, our domestic operational risks.

While we ceased operations of our marketplaces in Germany, Italy and Spain and stopped development of emerging marketplaces, we continue to operate marketplaces in the United Kingdom and Canada, which are less familiar competitive environments and involve various risks, including the need to invest significant resources and the likelihood that returns on such investments will not be achieved for several years, or possibly at all. We expect to continue to incur losses in the United Kingdom and Canada, and face various other challenges.

For example, in the United Kingdom and Canada, we were not the first market entrant, and our competitors may be more established or otherwise better positioned than we are to succeed. Our competitors may offer services to dealers that make dealers dependent on them, such as hosting dealers’ websites and providing inventory feeds for dealers, which would make it difficult to attract dealers to our marketplaces. Dealers may also be parties to agreements with other dealers and syndicates that prevent them from being able to access our marketplaces. Any of these barriers could impede our operations in our international markets, which could affect our business and potential growth.

In addition to English, we have made portions of our marketplaces available in French and Spanish. We may have difficulty in modifying our technology and content for use in non-English-speaking market segments or gaining acceptance by users in non-English-speaking market segments. Our ability to manage our business and conduct our operations internationally requires considerable management attention and resources, and is subject to the particular challenges of supporting a business in an environment of multiple languages, cultures, customs, legal and regulatory systems, alternative dispute resolution systems, and commercial infrastructures. Operating internationally may subject us to different risks or increase our exposure in connection with current risks, including risks associated with: recruiting, managing and retaining qualified multilingual employees, including sales personnel; adapting our websites and mobile applications to conform to local consumer behavior; increased competition from local websites and mobile applications and potential preferences by local populations for local providers; compliance with applicable foreign laws and regulations, including different privacy, censorship, and liability standards and regulations, and different intellectual property laws; providing solutions in different languages and for different cultures, which may require that we modify our solutions and features so they are culturally relevant in different countries; the enforceability of our intellectual property rights; credit risk and higher levels of payment fraud; compliance with anti-bribery laws, including compliance with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and the United Kingdom Bribery Act; currency exchange rate fluctuations; adverse changes in trade relationships among foreign countries and/or between the United States and such countries, including as related to the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union, or the EU, commonly referred to as “Brexit”; double taxation of our international earnings and potentially adverse tax consequences arising from the tax laws of the United States or the foreign jurisdictions in which we operate; and higher costs of doing business internationally.

Dealer closures or consolidations could reduce demand for our products, which may decrease our revenue.

In the past, the number of United States dealers has declined due to dealership closures and consolidations as a result of factors such as global economic downturns and we expect this has occurred and will continue to occur as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. When dealers consolidate, the services they previously purchased separately are often purchased by the combined entity in a lesser quantity or for a lower aggregate price than before, leading to volume compression and loss of revenue. Further dealership consolidations or closures could reduce the aggregate demand for our products and services. If dealership closures and consolidations occur in the future, our business, financial position and results of operations could be materially and adversely affected.

We depend on key personnel to operate our business, and if we are unable to retain, attract and integrate qualified personnel, or if we experience turnover of our key personnel, our ability to develop and successfully grow our business could be materially and adversely affected.

We believe our success has depended, and continues to depend, on the efforts and talents of our executives and employees. Our future success depends on our continuing ability to attract, develop, motivate, and retain highly qualified and skilled employees. Qualified individuals are in high demand, and we may incur significant costs to attract and retain them, and we may become less competitive in attracting and retaining employees as a result of our expense reduction efforts due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, any unplanned turnover or our failure to develop an adequate succession plan for any of our executive officers or key employees, or the reduction in their involvement in the management of our business, could materially adversely affect our ability to execute our business plan and strategy, and we may not be able to find adequate replacements on a timely basis, or at all. Our executive officers and other employees are at-will employees, which means they may terminate their employment relationships with us at any time, and their knowledge of our business and industry would be extremely difficult to replace. We cannot ensure that we will be able to retain the services of any members of our senior management or other key employees. If we do not succeed in attracting well-qualified employees or retaining and motivating existing employees, our business could be materially and adversely affected.

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In January 2021, we announced the promotion of Jason Trevisan from Chief Financial Officer and President, International to the role of Chief Executive Officer, and the transition of Langley Steinert from Chief Executive Officer to Executive Chairman. Additionally, Scot Fredo, our former Senior Vice President, Financial Planning & Analysis, was appointed to succeed Jason Trevisan in the role of Chief Financial Officer. We may face risks related to these and other transitions in our leadership team, including the disruption of our operations and the depletion of our institutional knowledge base.  

We may be subject to disputes regarding the accuracy of Instant Market Values, Deal Ratings, Dealer Ratings, New Car Price Guidance and other features of our marketplaces.

We provide consumers using our CarGurus marketplaces with our proprietary IMV, Deal Ratings, and Dealer Ratings, as well as other features to help them evaluate vehicle listings, including price guidance for new car listings, or New Car Price Guidance. Our valuation models depend on the inventory listed on our sites as well as public information regarding automotive sales. If the inventory on our site declines significantly, or if the number of automotive sales declines significantly or used car sales prices become volatile, whether as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic or otherwise, our valuation models may not perform as expected. Revisions to or errors in our automated valuation models, or the algorithms that underlie them, may cause the IMV, the Deal Rating, New Car Price Guidance, or other features to vary from our expectations regarding the accuracy of these tools. In addition, from time to time, regulators, consumers, dealers and other industry participants may question or disagree with our IMV, Deal Rating, Dealer Rating or New Car Price Guidance. Any such questions or disagreements could result in distraction from our business or potentially harm our reputation, could result in a decline in consumers’ use of our marketplaces and could result in legal disputes.

We are subject to a complex framework of laws and regulations, many of which are unsettled, still developing and contradictory, which have in the past, and could in the future, subject us to claims, challenge our business model, or otherwise harm our business.

Various aspects of our business are, may become, or may be viewed by regulators from time to time as subject, directly or indirectly, to United States federal, state and local laws and regulations, and to foreign laws and regulations.

Local Motor Vehicle Sales, Advertising and Brokering, and Consumer Protection Laws

The advertising and sale of new and used motor vehicles is highly regulated by the jurisdictions in which we do business. Although we do not sell motor vehicles, and although we believe that vehicle listings on our sites are not themselves advertisements, regulatory authorities or third parties could take the position that some of the laws or regulations applicable to dealers or to the manner in which motor vehicles are advertised and sold generally are directly applicable to our business. These advertising laws and regulations are frequently subject to multiple interpretations and are not uniform from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, sometimes imposing inconsistent requirements with respect to new or used motor vehicles. If our marketplaces and related products are determined to not comply with relevant regulatory requirements, we or dealers could be subject to civil and criminal penalties, including fines, or the award of significant damages in class actions or other civil litigation, as well as orders interfering with our ability to continue providing our marketplaces and related products and services in certain jurisdictions. In addition, even absent such a determination, to the extent dealers are uncertain about the applicability of such laws and regulations to our business, we may lose, or have difficulty increasing the number of paying dealers, which would affect our future growth.  

If regulators or other third parties take the position that our marketplaces or related products violate applicable brokering, bird-dog, consumer protection, consumer finance or advertising laws or regulations, responding to such allegations could be costly, could require us to pay significant sums in settlements, could require us to pay civil and criminal penalties, including fines, could interfere with our ability to continue providing our marketplaces and related products in certain jurisdictions, or could require us to make adjustments to our marketplaces and related products or the manner in which we derive revenue from dealers using our platform, any or all of which could result in substantial adverse publicity, termination of subscriptions by dealers, decreased revenues, distraction for our employees, increased expenses, and decreased profitability.

Federal Laws and Regulations

The United States Federal Trade Commission, or the FTC, has the authority to take actions to remedy or prevent acts or practices that it considers to be unfair or deceptive and that affect commerce in the United States. If the FTC takes the position in the future that any aspect of our business, including our advertising and privacy practices, constitutes an unfair or deceptive act or practice, responding to such allegations could require us to defend our practices and pay significant damages, settlements, and civil penalties, or could require us to make adjustments to our marketplaces and related products and services, any or all of which could result in substantial adverse publicity, distraction for our employees, loss of participating dealers, lost revenues, increased expenses, and decreased profitability.

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Our platforms enable us, dealers, and users to send and receive text messages and other mobile phone communications. The TCPA, as interpreted and implemented by the FCC and federal and state courts, impose significant restrictions on utilization of telephone calls and text messages to residential and mobile telephone numbers as a means of communication, particularly if the prior express consent of the person being contacted has not been obtained. Violations of the TCPA may be enforced by the FCC, by state attorneys general, or by others through litigation, including class actions. Furthermore, several provisions of the TCPA, as well as applicable rules and orders, are open to multiple interpretations, and compliance may involve fact-specific analyses.

Any failure by us, or the third parties on which we rely, to adhere to, or successfully implement, appropriate processes and procedures in response to existing or future laws and regulations could result in legal and monetary liability, fines and penalties, or damage to our reputation in the marketplace, any of which could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and results of operations. Even if the claims are meritless, we may be required to expend resources and pay costs to defend against regulatory actions or third-party claims. Additionally, any change to applicable laws or their interpretations that further restricts the way consumers and dealers interact through our platforms, or any governmental or private enforcement actions related thereto, could adversely affect our ability to attract customers and could harm our business, financial condition, results of operations, and cash flows.

Antitrust and Other Laws

Antitrust and competition laws prohibit, among other things, any joint conduct among competitors that would lessen competition in the marketplace. A governmental or private civil action alleging the improper exchange of information, or unlawful participation in price maintenance or other unlawful or anticompetitive activity, even if unfounded, could be costly to defend and could harm our business, results of operations, financial condition, and cash flows.

Claims could be made against us under both United States and foreign laws, including claims for defamation, libel, invasion of privacy, false advertising, intellectual property infringement, or claims based on other theories related to the nature and content of the materials disseminated by our marketplaces and on portions of our websites. Our defense against any of these actions could be costly and involve significant time and attention of our management and other resources. If we become liable for information transmitted in our marketplaces, we could be directly harmed and we may be forced to implement new measures to reduce our exposure to this liability.

The foregoing description of laws and regulations to which we are or may be subject is not exhaustive, and the regulatory framework governing our operations is subject to continuous change. We are, and we will continue to be, exposed to legal and regulatory risks including with respect to privacy, tax, law enforcement, content, intellectual property, competition, and other matters. The enactment of new laws and regulations or the interpretation of existing laws and regulations, both domestically and internationally, may affect the operation of our business, directly or indirectly, which could result in substantial regulatory compliance costs, civil or criminal penalties, including fines, adverse publicity, loss of subscribing dealers, lost revenues, increased expenses, and decreased profitability. Further, investigations by governmental agencies, including the FTC, into allegedly anticompetitive, unfair, deceptive or other business practices by us or dealers using our marketplaces, could cause us to incur additional expenses and, if adversely concluded, could result in substantial civil or criminal penalties and significant legal liability, or orders requiring us to make adjustments to our marketplaces and related products and services.

Our business is subject to risks related to the larger automotive industry ecosystem, which could have a material adverse effect on our business, revenue, results of operations, and financial condition.

Decreases in consumer demand could adversely affect the market for automobile purchases and, as a result, reduce the number of consumers using our platform. Consumer purchases of new and used automobiles generally decline during recessionary periods and other periods in which disposable income is adversely affected and we believe that we have entered such a period as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Purchases of new and used automobiles are typically discretionary for consumers and have been, and may continue to be, affected by negative trends in the economy, including: the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the cost of energy and gasoline; the availability and cost of credit; rising interest rates; reductions in business and consumer confidence; stock market volatility; and increased unemployment.

Further, in recent years the market for motor vehicles has experienced rapid changes in technology and consumer demands. Self-driving technology, ride sharing, transportation networks, and other fundamental changes in transportation including those arising as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic could impact consumer demand for the purchase of automobiles. A reduction in the number of automobiles purchased by consumers could adversely affect dealers and car manufacturers and lead to a reduction in other spending by these groups, including targeted incentive programs.

In addition, our business may be negatively affected by challenges to the larger automotive industry ecosystem, including global supply chain challenges, changes to trade policies, including tariff rates and customs duties, trade relations between the United States and China and other macroeconomic issues, including the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. These factors could have a material adverse effect on our business, revenue, results of operations, and financial condition.

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Making decisions that we believe are in the best interests of our marketplaces may cause us to forgo short-term gains in pursuit of potential but uncertain long-term growth.

In the past, we have forgone, and we will in the future continue to forgo, certain expansion or short-term revenue opportunities that we do not believe are in the long-term best interests of our marketplaces, even if such decisions negatively impact our results of operations in the short term. For example, during select monthly service periods in 2020 we provided paying dealers with marketplace subscriptions at no cost or at a discount in an effort to help our paying dealers maintain their business health during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, such strategies may not result in the long-term benefits that we expect, in which case our user traffic and engagement, business, and financial results could be harmed.

A significant disruption in service on our websites or mobile applications could damage our reputation and result in a loss of consumers, which could harm our business, brands, operating results, and financial condition.

Our brands, reputation, and ability to attract consumers, dealers, and advertisers depend on the reliable performance of our technology infrastructure and content delivery. We have experienced, and we may in the future experience, interruptions with our systems. Interruptions in these systems, whether due to system failures, computer viruses, ransomware, physical or electronic break-ins, or otherwise, could affect the security or availability of our marketplaces on our websites and mobile applications, and prevent or inhibit the ability of dealers and consumers to access our marketplaces. For example, past disruptions have impacted our ability to activate customer accounts and manage our billing activities in a timely manner. Such interruptions could also result in third parties accessing our confidential and proprietary information, including our intellectual property. Problems with the reliability or security of our systems could harm our reputation, harm our ability to protect our confidential and proprietary information, result in a loss of consumers and dealers, and result in additional costs.

Substantially all of the communications, network, and computer hardware used to operate our platforms is located in the United States near Boston, Massachusetts, and internationally near each of London, England and Dublin, Ireland. Although we can host our CarGurus’ marketplace from two alternative locations in the United States and we believe our systems are redundant, there may be exceptions for certain hardware or software. In addition, we do not own or control the operation of these facilities. We also use third-party hosting services to back up some data but do not maintain redundant systems or facilities for some of the services. A disruption to one or more of these systems may cause us to experience an extended period of system unavailability, which could negatively impact our relationship with consumers, customers and advertisers. Our systems and operations are vulnerable to damage or interruption from fire, flood, power loss, telecommunications failure, terrorist attacks, acts of war, electronic and physical break-ins, computer viruses, earthquakes, and similar events. The occurrence of any of these events could result in damage to our systems and hardware or could cause them to fail. In addition, we may not have sufficient protection or recovery plans in certain circumstances.

Problems faced by our third-party web hosting providers could adversely affect the experience consumers have while using our marketplaces. Our third-party web hosting providers could close their facilities without adequate notice. Any financial difficulties, up to and including bankruptcy, faced by our third-party web hosting providers or any of the service providers whose services they use, which may be exacerbated as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, may have negative effects on our business, the nature and extent of which are difficult to predict. If our third-party web hosting providers are unable to keep up with our capacity needs, our business could be harmed.

Any errors, defects, disruptions, or other performance or reliability problems with our network operations could cause interruptions in access to our marketplaces as well as delays and additional expense in arranging new facilities and services and could harm our reputation, business, operating results, and financial condition. Although we carry insurance, it may not be sufficient to compensate us for the potentially significant losses, including the potential harm to the future growth of our business, that may result from interruptions in our service as a result of system failures.

We collect, process, store, transfer, share, disclose, and use consumer information and other data, and our actual or perceived failure to protect such information and data or respect users’ privacy could damage our reputation and brands and harm our business and operating results.

Some functions of our marketplaces involve the storage and transmission of consumers’ information, such as IP addresses, contact information of users who connect with dealers and profile information of users who create accounts on our marketplaces, as well as dealers’ information. We also process and store personal and confidential information of our vendors, partners, and employees. Some of this information may be private, and security breaches could expose us to a risk of loss or exposure of this information, which could result in potential liability, litigation, and remediation costs. For example, hackers could steal our users’ profile passwords, names, email addresses, phone numbers, and other personal information. We rely on encryption and authentication technology licensed from third parties to effect secure transmission of such information. Like all information systems and technology, our websites, mobile applications, and information systems are subject to computer viruses, break-ins, phishing attacks, attempts to overload the systems with denial-of-service or other attacks, ransomware, and similar incidents or disruptions from unauthorized use of our computer systems, any of which could lead to interruptions, delays, or website shutdowns, and could cause loss of critical data and the unauthorized disclosure,

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access, acquisition, alteration, and use of personal or other confidential information. If we experience compromises to our security that result in website or mobile application performance or availability problems, the complete shutdown of our websites or mobile applications, or the loss or unauthorized disclosure, access, acquisition, alteration, or use of confidential information, consumers, customers, advertisers, partners, vendors, and employees may lose trust and confidence in us, and consumers may decrease the use of our websites or stop using our websites entirely, dealers may stop or decrease their subscriptions with us, and advertisers may decrease or stop advertising on our websites.  

Further, outside parties have attempted and will likely continue to attempt to fraudulently induce employees, consumers, or advertisers to disclose sensitive information in order to gain access to our information or our consumers’, dealers’, advertisers’, and employees’ information. As cyber-attacks increase in frequency and sophistication, our cyber-security and business continuity plans may not be effective in anticipating, preventing and effectively responding to all potential cyber-risk exposures. In addition, because the techniques used to obtain unauthorized access, disable or degrade service, or sabotage systems change frequently, often are not recognized until after having been launched against a target, and may originate from less regulated and remote areas around the world, we may be unable to proactively address these techniques or to implement adequate preventative measures.

Any or all of the issues above could adversely affect our brand reputation, negatively impact our ability to attract new consumers and increase engagement by existing consumers, cause existing consumers to curtail or stop use of our marketplaces or close their accounts, cause existing dealers and advertisers to cancel their contracts, cause employees to terminate their employment, cause employment candidates to be unwilling to pursue employment opportunities or accept employment offers, and or subject us to governmental or third-party lawsuits, investigations, regulatory fines, or other actions or liability, thereby harming our business, results of operations, and financial condition.

There are numerous federal, national, state, and local laws and regulations in the United States and around the world regarding privacy and the collection, processing, storage, sharing, disclosure, use, cross-border transfer, and protection of personal information and other data. These laws and regulations are evolving, are subject to differing interpretations, may be costly to comply with, may result in regulatory fines or penalties, may subject us to third-party lawsuits, may be inconsistent between countries and jurisdictions, and may conflict with other requirements.

We seek to comply with industry standards and are subject to the terms of our privacy policies and privacy-related obligations to third parties, as well as all applicable laws and regulations relating to privacy and data protection. However, it is possible that these obligations may be interpreted and applied in new ways or in a manner that is inconsistent from one jurisdiction to another and may conflict with other rules or our practices and that new regulations could be enacted. Several proposals have recently become effective or are pending, as applicable, before federal, state, local, and foreign legislative and regulatory bodies that could significantly affect our business, including the General Data Protection Regulation in the EU, or the GDPR, which went into effect on May 25, 2018, the California Consumer Privacy Act, or the CCPA, which went into effect on January 1, 2020, and the California Privacy Rights Act, or the CPRA, which goes into effect January 1, 2023. The GDPR and CCPA in particular have already required, and along with the CPRA, may further require, us to change our policies and procedures and may in the future require us to make changes to our marketplaces and other products. These and other requirements could reduce demand for our marketplaces and other offerings, require us to take on more onerous obligations in our contracts and restrict our ability to store, transfer, and process data, which may seriously harm our business. Similarly, Brexit and the Schrems II decision of the Court of Justice of the EU may require us to change our policies and procedures and, if we are not in compliance, may also seriously harm our business. We may not be entirely successful in our efforts to comply with the evolving regulations to which we are subject due to various factors within our control, such as limited internal resource allocation, or outside our control, such as a lack of vendor cooperation, new regulatory interpretations, or lack of regulatory guidance in respect of certain GDPR, CCPA, or CPRA requirements.  

Any failure or perceived failure by us to comply with United States and international data protection laws and regulations, our privacy policies, or our privacy-related obligations to consumers, customers, employees and other third parties, or any compromise of security that results in the unauthorized release or transfer of sensitive information, which could include personal information or other user data, may result in governmental investigations, enforcement actions, regulatory fines, litigation, criminal penalties, or public statements against us by consumer advocacy groups or others, and could cause consumers and dealers to lose trust in us, which could significantly impact our brand reputation and have an adverse effect on our business. Additionally, if any third party that we share information with experiences a security breach or fails to comply with its privacy-related legal obligations or commitments to us, such matters may put employee, consumer or dealer information at risk and could in turn expose us to claims for damages or regulatory fines or penalties and harm our reputation, business, and operating results.

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Our ability to attract consumers to our own websites and to provide certain services to our customers depends on the collection of consumer data from various sources, which may be restricted by consumer choice, privacy restrictions, and developments in laws, regulations and industry standards.

The success of our consumer marketing and the delivery of internet advertisements for our customers depends on our ability to leverage data, including data that we collect from our customers, data we receive from our publisher partners and third parties, and data from our operations. Using cookies and non-cookie-based technologies, such as mobile advertising identifiers, we collect information about the interactions of users with our customers’ and publishers’ digital properties (including, for example, information about the placement of advertisements and users’ shopping or other interactions with our customers’ websites or advertisements). Our ability to successfully leverage such data depends on our continued ability to access and use such data, which could be restricted by a number of factors, including: increasing consumer adoption of “do not track” mechanisms as a result of legislation including GDPR, CCPA, and CPRA; privacy restrictions imposed by web browser developers, advertising partners or other software developers that impair our ability to understand the preferences of consumers by limiting the use of third-party cookies or other tracking technologies or data indicating or predicting consumer preferences; and new developments in, or new interpretations of, privacy laws, regulations and industry standards.

Each of these developments could materially impact our ability to collect consumer data and deliver relevant internet advertisements to attract consumers to our websites or to deliver targeted advertising for our advertising customers. If we are unsuccessful in evolving our advertising and marketing strategies to adapt to and mitigate these evolving consumer data limitations, our business results could be materially impacted.

We have been, and may again be, subject to intellectual property disputes, which are costly to defend and could harm our business and operating results.

We have been and expect in the future to be subject to claims and litigation alleging that we infringe others’ intellectual property rights, including the trademarks, copyrights, patents, and other intellectual property rights of third parties, including from our competitors or non-practicing entities. We may also learn of possible infringement to our trademarks, copyrights, patents, and other intellectual property. In addition, we could be subject to lawsuits where consumers and dealers posting content on our websites disseminate materials that infringe the intellectual property rights of third parties.  

Patent and other intellectual property litigation may be protracted and expensive, and the results are difficult to predict and may result in significant settlement costs or payment of substantial damages. Many potential litigants, including patent holding companies, have the ability to dedicate substantially greater resources to enforce their intellectual property rights and to defend claims that may be brought against them. Furthermore, a successful claimant could secure a judgment that requires us to stop offering some features or prevents us from conducting our business as we have historically done or may desire to do in the future. We might also be required to seek a license and pay royalties for the use of such intellectual property, which may not be available on commercially acceptable terms, or at all. Alternatively, we may be required to modify our marketplaces and features while we develop non-infringing substitutes, which could require significant effort and expense and may ultimately not be successful.

In addition, we use open source software in our platform and will use open source software in the future. From time to time, we may face claims from companies that incorporate open source software into their products, claiming ownership of, or demanding release of, the source code, the open source software, or derivative works that were developed using such software, or otherwise seeking to enforce the terms of the applicable open source license. These claims could also result in litigation, require us to purchase a costly license or require us to devote additional product, technology, and development resources to change our platforms or services, any of which would have a negative effect on our business and operating results.

Even if these matters do not result in litigation or are resolved in our favor or without significant cash settlements, these matters, and the time and resources necessary to litigate or resolve them, could harm our business, our operating results, and our reputation.

Failure to adequately protect our intellectual property could harm our business and operating results.

Our business depends on our intellectual property, the protection of which is crucial to the success of our business. We rely on a combination of patent, trademark, trade secret, and copyright law and contractual restrictions to protect our intellectual property. In addition, we attempt to protect our intellectual property, technology, and confidential information by requiring our employees and consultants to enter into confidentiality and assignment of inventions agreements and third parties to enter into nondisclosure agreements as we deem appropriate. Despite our efforts to protect our proprietary rights, unauthorized parties may attempt to copy aspects of our platform’s features, software, and functionality or obtain and use information that we consider proprietary.

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Competitors may adopt trademarks or trade names similar to ours, thereby harming our ability to build brand identity and possibly leading to user confusion. In addition, there could be potential trade name or trademark infringement claims brought by owners of other registered trademarks, or trademarks that incorporate variations of our trademarks. We have registered the CARGURUS and CG logos, as well as the word-mark CARGURUS, in the U.S., Canada and the United Kingdom.  

We currently hold the “CarGurus.com” internet domain name and various other related domain names relating to our brands. The regulation of domain names is subject to change. Regulatory bodies could establish additional top-level domains, appoint additional domain name registrars, or modify the requirements for holding domain names. As a result, we may not be able to acquire or maintain all domain names that use the names of our brands. In addition, third parties have created and may in the future create copycat or squatter domains to deceive consumers, which could harm our brands, interfere with our ability to register domain names, and result in additional costs.

We may be unable to halt the operations of websites that aggregate or misappropriate our data.

From time to time, third parties may misappropriate our data through website scraping, robots, or other means and aggregate this data with data from other sources. In addition, copycat websites may misappropriate data in our marketplaces and attempt to imitate our brands or the functionality of our websites. If we become aware of such activities, we intend to employ technological or legal measures in an attempt to halt their operations. However, we may be unable to detect and remedy all such activities in a timely manner. In some cases, our available remedies may not be adequate to protect us against the impact of such operations. Regardless of whether we can successfully enforce our rights against these third parties, any measures that we may take could require us to expend significant financial or other resources, which could harm our business, results of operations, and financial condition. In addition, to the extent that such activity creates confusion among consumers or advertisers, our brands and business could be harmed.

Seasonality and other factors may cause fluctuations in our operating results and our marketing spend.

Across the retail automotive industry, consumer purchases are typically greatest in the first three quarters of each year, due in part to the introduction of new vehicle models from manufacturers and the seasonal nature of consumer spending, and our consumer-marketing spend generally fluctuates accordingly. As consumer automotive purchases slow in the fourth quarter, our rate of marketing spend typically also slows. This seasonality has not been immediately apparent historically due to the overall growth of other operating expenses. In addition, reduction of our marketing spend in response to COVID-19-related expense management and shifts in demand from dealers and consumers could impact the efficiency of our marketing spend. For example, a larger portion of our advertising may run during peak holiday seasonality for retail advertisers, inflating our media costs. As our growth rates moderate or cease, the impact of these seasonality trends and other influences on our results of operations could become more pronounced.  

Failure to deal effectively with fraud or other illegal activity could lead to potential legal liability, harm our business, cause us to lose paying dealer customers and adversely affect our reputation, financial performance and prospects for growth.

Based on the nature of our business we are exposed to potential fraudulent and illegal activity in our marketplaces, including: listings of automobiles that are not owned by the purported dealer or that the dealer has no intention of selling at the listed price; receipt of fraudulent leads that we may send to our dealers; and deceptive practices in our peer-to-peer marketplace. The measures we have in place to detect and limit the occurrence of such fraudulent and illegal activity in our marketplaces may not always be effective or account for all types of fraudulent or other illegal activity. Further, the measures that we use to detect and limit the occurrence of fraudulent and illegal activity must be dynamic, as technologies and ways to commit fraud and illegal activity are continually evolving. Failure to limit the impact of fraudulent and illegal activity on our websites could lead to potential legal liability, harm our business, cause us to lose paying dealer customers and adversely affect our reputation, financial performance and prospects for growth.

Risks Related to Our Class A Common Stock

Our founder controls a majority of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock, and, therefore, has control over key decision-making and could control our actions in a manner that conflicts with the interests of other stockholders.

Primarily by virtue of his holdings in shares of our Class B common stock, which has a ten-to-one voting ratio compared to our Class A common stock, Langley Steinert, our founder, Chairman of the Board and Executive Chairman, is able to exercise voting rights with respect to a majority of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock and therefore has the ability to control the outcome of matters submitted to our stockholders for approval, including the election of directors and any merger, consolidation, or sale of all or substantially all of our assets. This concentrated control could delay, defer, or prevent a change of control, merger, consolidation, or sale of all or substantially all of our assets that our other stockholders support, or conversely this concentrated control could result in the consummation of such a transaction that our other stockholders do not support. This concentrated control could also discourage a potential investor from acquiring our Class A

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common stock, which might harm the trading price of our Class A common stock. In addition, Mr. Steinert has significant influence in the management and major strategic investments of our company as a result of his positions as Executive Chairman, and his ability to control the election or replacement of our directors. As Chairman of the Board and our Executive Chairman, Mr. Steinert owes a fiduciary duty to our stockholders and must act in good faith in a manner he reasonably believes to be in the best interests of our stockholders. If Mr. Steinert’s status as an officer and a director is terminated, his fiduciary duties to our stockholders will also terminate, but his voting power as a stockholder will not be reduced as a result of such termination unless such termination is either made voluntarily by Mr. Steinert or due to Mr. Steinert’s death, or if the sum of the number of shares of our capital stock held by Mr. Steinert, by any Family Member of Mr. Steinert, and by any Permitted Entity of Mr. Steinert (as such terms are defined in our amended and restated certificate of incorporation), assuming the exercise and settlement in full of all outstanding options and convertible securities and calculated on an as-converted to Class A common stock basis, is less than 9,091,484 shares. As a stockholder, even a controlling stockholder, Mr. Steinert is entitled to vote his shares in his own interests, which may not always be aligned with the interests of our other stockholders.  

We believe that Mr. Steinert’s continued control of a majority of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock is beneficial to us and is in the best interests of our stockholders. In the event that Mr. Steinert no longer controls a majority of the voting power, whether as a result of the disposition of some or all his shares of Class A or Class B common stock, the conversion of the Class B common stock into Class A common stock in accordance with its terms, or otherwise, our business or the trading price of our Class A common stock may be adversely affected.

The multiple class structure of our common stock has the effect of concentrating voting control with our founder and certain other holders of our Class B common stock, which will limit or preclude the ability of our stockholders to influence corporate matters.

Our Class B common stock has ten votes per share and our Class A common stock has one vote per share. Our founder and certain of his affiliates hold a substantial number of the outstanding shares of our Class B common stock and therefore hold a substantial majority of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock. Because of the ten-to-one voting ratio between our Class B and Class A common stock, the holders of our Class B common stock collectively control a majority of the combined voting power of our common stock and therefore are able to control all matters submitted to our stockholders for approval so long as the shares of Class B common stock represent at least 9.1% of all outstanding shares of our Class A and Class B common stock. This concentrated control will limit or preclude the ability of our other stockholders to influence corporate matters for the foreseeable future.

Transfers by holders of Class B common stock will generally result in those shares converting into Class A common stock, subject to limited exceptions, such as certain transfers effected for estate planning or charitable purposes. The conversion of Class B common stock into Class A common stock has had and will continue to have the effect, over time, of increasing the relative voting power of those holders of Class B common stock who retain such shares. If, for example, Mr. Steinert retains a significant portion of his holdings of Class B common stock, he could continue to control a majority of the combined voting power of our outstanding capital stock.

The trading price of our Class A common stock has been and may continue to be volatile and the value of our stockholders’ investment in our stock could decline.

The trading price of our Class A common stock has been and may continue to be volatile and fluctuate substantially. The trading price of our Class A common stock depends on a number of factors, including those described in this “Risk Factors” section, many of which are beyond our control and may not be related to our operating performance. Factors that could cause fluctuations in the trading price of our Class A common stock include the following: changes in the operating performance and stock market valuations of other technology companies generally, or those in our industry in particular; sales of shares of our Class A common stock by us or our stockholders; adverse changes to recommendations regarding our stock by securities analysts that cover us; failure of securities analysts to maintain coverage of us, changes in financial estimates by any securities analysts who follow our company, or our failure to meet these estimates or the expectations of investors; announcements by us or our competitors of new products; the public’s reaction to our issuances of earnings guidance or other public announcements and filing; real or perceived inaccuracies in our key metrics; actions of an activist stockholder; actual or anticipated changes in our operating results or fluctuations in our operating results or developments in our business, our competitors’ businesses, or the competitive landscape generally; litigation involving us or investigations by regulators into our operations or those of our competitors; developments or disputes concerning our proprietary rights; announced or completed acquisitions of businesses or technologies by us or our competitors; new laws or regulations or new interpretations of existing laws or regulations applicable to our business; changes in accounting standards, policies, or guidelines; any significant change in our management; changes in the automobile industry; and general economic conditions, including as related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Our status as a “controlled company” could make our Class A common stock less attractive to some investors or otherwise harm the trading price of our Class A common stock.

More than 50% of our voting power is held by Mr. Steinert. As a result, we are a “controlled company” under the corporate governance rules for Nasdaq-listed companies and may elect not to comply with certain Nasdaq corporate governance requirements. We rely and have relied on certain or all of these exemptions. Accordingly, should the interests of our controlling stockholder differ from those of other stockholders, the other stockholders may not have the same protections afforded to stockholders of companies that are subject to all of the corporate governance rules for Nasdaq-listed companies. Our status as a controlled company could make our Class A common stock less attractive to some investors or otherwise harm our stock price.

General Risk Factors

We participate in a highly competitive market, and pressure from existing and new companies may adversely affect our business and operating results.

We face significant competition from companies that provide listings, car-shopping information, lead generation, marketing, and car-buying services designed to help consumers shop for cars and to enable dealers to reach these consumers. Our competitors include online automotive marketplaces and websites, internet search engines, digital marketing providers, peer to peer marketplaces, sites operated by automobile dealers, and online dealerships. We compete with these and other companies for a share of dealers’ overall marketing budget for online and offline media marketing spend and we compete with these and other companies in attracting consumers to our websites. To the extent that dealers view alternative marketing and media strategies to be superior to our marketplaces, we may not be able to maintain or grow the number of dealers subscribing to, and advertising on, our marketplaces, and our business and financial results may be adversely affected. We also expect that new competitors will continue to enter the online automotive retail industry with competing marketplaces, products, and services, and that existing competitors will expand to offer competing products or services, which could have an adverse effect on our business and financial results.

Our competitors could significantly impede our ability to expand the number of dealers using our marketplaces or could offer discounts that could significantly impede our ability to maintain our pricing structure. Our competitors may also develop and market new technologies that render our existing or future platforms and associated products less competitive, unmarketable, or obsolete. In addition, if our competitors develop platforms with similar or superior functionality to ours, or if our web traffic declines, we may need to decrease our subscription and advertising fees. If we are unable to maintain our current pricing structure due to competitive pressures, our revenue would likely be reduced and our financial results would be negatively affected.

Our existing and potential competitors may have significantly more financial, technical, marketing, and other resources than we have, which may allow them to offer more competitive pricing and the ability to devote greater resources to the development, promotion, and support of their marketplaces, products, and services. They may also have more extensive automotive industry relationships than we have, longer operating histories, and greater name recognition. In addition, these competitors may be able to respond more quickly with technological advances and to undertake more extensive marketing or promotional campaigns than we can. To the extent that any competitor has existing relationships with dealers or auto manufacturers for marketing or data analytics solutions, those dealers and auto manufacturers may be unwilling to partner with us. If we are unable to compete with these competitors, the demand for our marketplaces and related products and services could substantially decline.

We rely on third-party service providers and strategic partners for many aspects of our business, and any failure to maintain these relationships or to successfully integrate certain third-party platforms could harm our business.

Our success depends upon our relationships with third parties, including, among others, our payment processor, our data center hosts, our information technology providers and our data providers for inventory and vehicle information. If these third parties experience difficulty meeting our requirements or standards, have adverse audit results, violate the terms of our agreements or applicable law, fail to obtain or maintain applicable licenses, or if the relationships we have established with such third parties expire or otherwise terminate, it could make it difficult for us to operate some aspects of our business, which could damage our business and reputation. In addition, if such third-party service providers or strategic partners were to cease operations, temporarily or permanently, face financial distress or other business disruptions, increase their fees, or if our relationships with these providers or partners deteriorate or terminate, whether as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic or otherwise, we could suffer increased costs and we may be unable to provide consumers with content or provide similar services until an equivalent provider could be found or we could develop replacement technology or operations. In addition, if we are unsuccessful in identifying or finding high-quality partners, if we fail to negotiate cost-effective relationships with them, or if we ineffectively manage these relationships, it could have an adverse impact on our business and financial results.

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Our enterprise systems require that we integrate the platforms hosted by certain third-party service providers. We are responsible for integrating these platforms and updating them to maintain proper functionality. Issues with these integrations, our failure to properly update third-party platforms or any interruptions to our internal enterprise systems could harm our business by causing delays in our ability to quote, activate service and bill new and existing customers on our platform.

We must maintain proper and effective internal controls over financial reporting and any failure to maintain the adequacy of these internal controls may adversely affect investor confidence in our company and, as a result, the value of our Class A common stock.

We are required, pursuant to Section 404 and the related rules adopted by the SEC, to furnish a report by management on, among other things, the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting on an annual basis. This assessment includes disclosure of any material weaknesses identified by our management in our internal control over financial reporting. During the evaluation and testing process, if we identify and fail to remediate one or more material weaknesses in our internal control over financial reporting, we will be unable to assert that our internal controls are effective.

In addition, our independent registered public accounting firm must attest to the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting under Section 404. Our independent registered public accounting firm may issue a report that is adverse to us in the event it is not satisfied with the level at which our controls are documented, designed or operating. We may not be able to remediate any future material weaknesses, or to complete our evaluation, testing and required remediation in a timely fashion. We are also required to disclose significant changes made to our internal control procedures on a quarterly basis. Our compliance with Section 404 requires that we incur substantial accounting expense and expend significant management efforts.

Any failure to maintain internal control over financial reporting could severely inhibit our ability to accurately report our financial condition or results of operations. If we are unable to assert that our internal control over financial reporting is effective or our independent registered public accounting firm is unable to express an opinion on the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting when it is required to issue such opinion, we could lose investor confidence in the accuracy and completeness of our financial reports, the market price of our Class A common stock could decline, and we could be subject to sanctions or investigations by Nasdaq, the SEC or other regulatory authorities.

We expect our results of operations to fluctuate on a quarterly and annual basis.

Our revenue and results of operations could vary significantly from period to period and may fail to match expectations as a result of a variety of factors, some of which are outside of our control, including the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results may vary as a result of fluctuations in the number of dealers subscribing to our marketplaces and the size and seasonal variability of our advertisers’ marketing budgets. As a result of the potential variations in our revenue and results of operations, period-to-period comparisons may not be meaningful and the results of any one period should not be relied on as an indication of future performance. In addition, our results of operations may not meet the expectations of investors or public market analysts who follow us, which may adversely affect the trading price of our Class A common stock.

We could be subject to adverse changes in tax laws, regulations and interpretations, plus challenges to our tax positions.

We are subject to taxation in the United States and certain other jurisdictions in which we operate. Changes in applicable tax laws or regulations may be proposed or enacted that could materially and adversely affect our effective tax rate, tax payments, results of operations, financial condition and cash flows. In addition, tax laws and regulations are complex and subject to varying interpretations. There is also uncertainty over sales tax liability as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc., which could precipitate reactions by legislators, regulators and courts that could adversely increase our tax administrative costs and tax risk, and negatively affect our overall business, results of operations, financial condition and cash flows. We are also regularly subject to audits by tax authorities. For example, we are currently under federal employment tax audit for tax years 2016 – 2018; New York State sales and uses tax audit for tax years 2014 – 2020 and Ohio State commercial activity tax audit for tax years 2013 – 2019. Any adverse development or outcome in connection with these tax audits, and any other audits or litigation, could materially and adversely impact our effective tax rate, tax payments, results of operations, financial condition and cash flows.

Confidentiality agreements may not adequately prevent disclosure of our trade secrets and other proprietary information.

In order to protect our technologies and processes, we rely in part on confidentiality agreements with our employees, independent contractors, and other advisors. These agreements may not effectively prevent disclosure of confidential information, including trade secrets, and may not provide an adequate remedy in the event of unauthorized disclosure of confidential information. To the extent that our employees, contractors, or other third parties with whom we do business use intellectual property owned by others in their work for us, disputes may arise as to the rights to related or resulting know-how and inventions. In addition, any changes in, or unexpected interpretations of, intellectual property laws may compromise our ability to enforce our trade secret and intellectual property rights. Costly and time-consuming litigation could be necessary to enforce and determine the scope of our proprietary rights, and failure to obtain or maintain protection of our trade secrets or other proprietary information could harm our business, results of operations, reputation, and competitive position.

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Item 1B. Unresolved Staff Comments.

Not applicable.

Item 2. Properties.

We do not own any real property. Our principal executive offices are located in Cambridge, Massachusetts where we lease a total of approximately 185,064 square feet of space in various parcels in three buildings. We also lease office space in Dublin, Ireland and San Francisco, California for our European and Autolist operations, respectively. We believe that our current facilities are suitable and adequate to meet our current needs. We believe that suitable additional space or substitute space will be available in the future to accommodate our operations as needed. In January 2021, CarOffer, LLC, our majority-owned subsidiary, entered into a sublease for office space at 15601 Dallas Parkway in Addison, Texas, which we expect CarOffer to occupy in March 2021 for its operations. In 2019, we entered into a lease for office space at 1001 Boylston Street in Boston, Massachusetts, which we expect to occupy in 2023.

Item 3. Legal Proceedings.

From time to time we may become involved in legal proceedings or be subject to claims arising in the ordinary course of our business. We are not presently subject to any pending or threatened litigation that we believe, if determined adversely to us, individually, or taken together, would reasonably be expected to have a material adverse effect on our business or financial results.

Item 4. Mine Safety Disclosures.

Not applicable.

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PART II

Item 5. Market for Registrant’s Common Equity, Related Stockholder Matters and Issuer Purchases of Equity Securities.

Market Information for Common Stock

Our Class A common stock has been listed on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol “CARG” since October 12, 2017. Prior to that date, there was no public trading market for our Class A common stock. Our initial public offering, or IPO, was priced at $16.00 per share on October 11, 2017.

On February 10, 2021, the last reported sale price of our Class A common stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market was $35.61 per share.

Holders

As of February 4, 2021, we had 34 holders of record of our Class A common stock. The actual number of stockholders is greater than this number of record holders, and includes stockholders who are beneficial owners but whose shares are held in street name by brokers and other nominees. The number of holders of record does not include stockholders whose shares may be held in trust by other entities.

Dividends

We have never declared or paid any cash dividends on our common stock. We currently anticipate that we will retain future earnings to fund development and growth of our business, and we do not anticipate paying cash dividends in the foreseeable future.

Performance Graph

This performance graph shall not be deemed “soliciting material” or to be “filed” with the Securities and Exchange Commission for purposes of Section 18 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, or the Exchange Act, or otherwise be subject to the liabilities under that section, and shall not be deemed to be incorporated by reference into any filing of CarGurus, Inc. under the Exchange Act or the Securities Act of 1933, as amended.

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The following graph shows a comparison from October 12, 2017 (the date our Class A common stock commenced trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market) through December 31, 2020 of the cumulative total return for our Class A common stock, the Nasdaq Composite Index and the S&P 500 Index. All values assume a $100 initial cash investment and data for the Nasdaq Composite Index and the S&P 500 Index assume reinvestment of dividends, if any. Such returns are based on historical results and are not intended to suggest future performance.

Recent Sales of Unregistered Securities

None.

Purchases of Equity Securities

None.

Item 6. Selected Consolidated Financial Data.

Not applicable.

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Item 7. Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations.

You should read the following discussion and analysis of our financial condition and results of operations together with our consolidated financial statements and the related notes and other financial information included elsewhere in this report. Some of the information contained in this discussion and analysis or elsewhere in this report, including information with respect to our plans and strategy for our business and our performance and future success, includes forward‑looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. See “Special Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements.” You should review the “Risk Factors” section of this Annual Report on Form 10-K for a discussion of important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the results described in or implied by the forward‑looking statements contained in the following discussion and analysis.

In this discussion, we use financial measures that are considered non‑GAAP financial measures under Securities and Exchange Commission rules. These rules regarding non-GAAP financial measures require supplemental explanation and reconciliation, which are included elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Investors should not consider non‑GAAP financial measures in isolation from or in substitution for, financial information presented in compliance with United States generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP.

This section of this Annual Report on Form 10-K discusses 2020 and 2019 items and year-to-year comparisons between 2020 and 2019. Discussions of 2018 items and year-to-year comparisons between 2019 and 2018 can be found in “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” in Part II, Item 7 of our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2019.

Company Overview

CarGurus is a global, online automotive marketplace connecting buyers and sellers of new and used cars. Using proprietary technology, search algorithms, and innovative data analytics, we believe we are building the world’s most trusted and transparent automotive marketplace and creating a differentiated automotive search experience for consumers. Our trusted marketplace empowers consumers with unbiased third‑party validation on pricing and dealer reputation as well as other information that aids them in finding “Great Deals from Top-Rated Dealers.”

We are headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts and were incorporated in the State of Delaware on June 26, 2015. We operate principally in the United States. In addition to the United States, we operate online marketplaces under the CarGurus brand in Canada and the United Kingdom. We also operated online marketplaces in Germany, Italy, and Spain until we ceased the operations of each of these marketplaces in the second quarter of 2020. In the United States and the United Kingdom, we also operate the Autolist and PistonHeads online marketplaces, respectively, as independent brands. We have subsidiaries in the United States, Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. Additionally, we have two reportable segments, United States and International. See Note 14 of our consolidated financial statements included elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K for more information on our segment reporting and geographical information.

We generate marketplace subscription revenue from dealers primarily through Listings and Dealer Display subscriptions, and advertising and other revenue from automobile manufacturers and other auto‑related brand advertisers as well as partnerships with financing services companies. We generated revenue of $551.5 million in 2020 and $588.9 million in 2019, representing a year-over-year decrease of 6%.

In 2020, we generated net income of $77.6 million and our Adjusted EBITDA was $160.8 million, compared to a net income of $42.1 million and Adjusted EBITDA of $77.0 million in 2019. See “Adjusted EBITDA” below for more information regarding our use of Adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP financial measure, and a reconciliation of Adjusted EBITDA to our net income.

COVID-19 Update

In December 2019, a novel strain of coronavirus, now referred to as COVID-19, surfaced and in 2020 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization after spreading globally. This pandemic has caused an international health crisis and resulted in significant disruptions to the global economy as well as businesses and capital markets around the world.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its adverse effects have become widespread in the locations where we, and our customers, suppliers and third-party business partners conduct business and as a result, we have experienced disruptions in our operations. For example, in March 2020, we closed all of our offices (including our corporate headquarters) and began requiring our employees to work remotely until further notice. In addition, in an effort to limit the spread of COVID-19, many countries, as well as states and localities in the United States, implemented or mandated and continue to implement or mandate significant restrictions on travel and commerce, shelter-in-place or stay-at-home orders, and business closures. Many

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of these orders resulted in restrictions on the ability of consumers to buy and sell automobiles by restricting operations at dealerships and/or by closing or reducing the services provided by certain service providers upon which dealerships rely. In addition, these restrictions and continued concern about the spread of the disease have impacted car shopping by consumers and disrupted the operations of car dealerships, which has adversely affected the market for automobile purchases. While consumer demand has improved since the initial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the automotive industry is experiencing, and may continue to experience, inventory supply problems, especially resulting from wholesale used-car auction closures and escalating auction prices, which have adversely affected the level of used-car inventory held by our paying dealers and displayed on our websites.

As a result of the travel and commerce restrictions and the impact on their businesses, for periods during the year ended December 31, 2020 a number of our dealer customers temporarily closed or operated on a reduced capacity, and many dealerships remain temporarily closed, continue to operate on a reduced capacity, and/or otherwise face significant financial challenges. Such closures and circumstances led some paying dealers to cancel their subscriptions and/or reduce their spending with us, which has had and may continue to have a material adverse effect on our revenues and our business. We also experienced an increase in account delinquencies from dealer customers challenged by the COVID-19 pandemic that failed to pay us on time or at all.

Further, because of the significant financial challenges that dealerships have faced and continue to face as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, we took measures to help our paying dealers maintain their business health during the COVID-19 pandemic. We proactively reduced the subscription fees for paying dealers by at least 50% on all marketplace subscriptions for the April and May 2020 service periods, as well as provided a fee reduction on all June 2020 marketplace subscriptions of 20% for paying dealers in the United States and Canada and 50% for paying dealers in the United Kingdom. These fee reductions resulted in a modification to contracts with initial contractual periods greater than one month. For any contract modified, we calculated the remaining transaction price and allocated the consideration over the remaining performance obligations. These fee reductions materially and adversely impacted revenue for the year ended December 31, 2020, resulting in an approximately $50 million decrease in marketplace subscription revenue. During the December 2020 and February 2021 service periods, we also suspended charging subscription fees for subscribing dealers in the United Kingdom. These fee reductions did not materially impact revenue for the year ended December 31, 2020 and are not expected to materially impact revenue for the year ending December 31, 2021. We continue to monitor and assess the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on our paying dealers and may in the future take additional measures to help our paying dealers maintain their business health during the COVID-19 pandemic.

These effects from the COVID-19 pandemic on our revenue caused us to implement certain cost-savings measures across our business. For example, during the second quarter of 2020, we initiated a cost-savings initiative that included a reduction in our workforce of approximately 13%, restricted future hiring, and limited discretionary spend across our business, including by eliminating, reducing or pausing certain vendor relationships and ceasing certain international operations and expansion efforts. In particular, we ceased marketplace operations in Germany, Italy, and Spain, and halted any new international expansion efforts, which we believe allows us to focus our financial and human capital resources on our more established international markets in Canada and the United Kingdom. We also reduced consumer marketing across both algorithmic traffic acquisition and brand spend during the year ended December 31, 2020 in comparison to the year ended December 31, 2019 in an effort to reduce expenses and as a result of suppressed dealer inventory and the resulting reduced demand for leads by dealers.

In May 2020, cancellations by paying dealers began to stabilize, which we believe resulted from the resumption of consumer activity as well as the fee reductions that we provided to our customers. In July 2020, we returned to normal contractual billings in all markets until subscription fees were reduced again for the December 2020 and February 2021 service periods for paying dealers in the United Kingdom. Additionally, we increased our consumer marketing expenses as consumer activity increased and governments began to implement phased re-opening policies.

We continue to monitor and assess the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on our commercial operations, including the future impact on our revenue. However, we cannot at this time accurately predict what effects these conditions will ultimately have on our future revenue and operations. See the “Risk Factors” section of this Annual Report on Form 10-K for further discussion of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on our business.

Key Business Metrics

We regularly review a number of metrics, including the key metrics listed below, to evaluate our business, measure our performance, identify trends affecting our business, formulate financial projections, and make operating and strategic decisions. We believe it is important to evaluate these metrics for the United States and International segments. The

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International segment derives revenues from marketplace subscriptions, advertising services, and other revenues from customers outside of the United States. International markets perform differently from the United States market due to a variety of factors, including our operating history in each market, our rate of investment, market size, market maturity, competition and other dynamics unique to each country.

Monthly Unique Users

For each of our websites, we define a monthly unique user as an individual who has visited any such website within a calendar month, based on data as measured by Google Analytics. We calculate average monthly unique users as the sum of the monthly unique users of each of our websites in a given period, divided by the number of months in that period. We count a unique user the first time a computer or mobile device with a unique device identifier accesses any of our websites during a calendar month. If an individual accesses a website using a different device within a given month, the first access by each such device is counted as a separate unique user. If an individual uses multiple browsers on a single device and/or clears their cookies and returns to our site within a calendar month, multiple users would be recorded. We view our average monthly unique users as a key indicator of the quality of our user experience, the effectiveness of our advertising and traffic acquisition, and the strength of our brand awareness. Measuring unique users is important to us and we believe it provides useful information to our investors because our marketplace subscription revenue depends, in part, on our ability to provide dealers with connections to our users and exposure to our marketplace audience. We define connections as interactions between consumers and dealers on our marketplace through phone calls, email, managed text and chat, and clicks to access the dealer’s website or map directions to the dealership.

Monthly Sessions

We define monthly sessions as the number of distinct visits to our websites that take place each month within a given time frame, as measured and defined by Google Analytics. We calculate average monthly sessions as the sum of the monthly sessions in a given period, divided by the number of months in that period. A session is defined as beginning with the first page view from a computer or mobile device and ending at the earliest of when a user closes their browser window, after 30 minutes of inactivity, or each night at midnight (i) Eastern Time for our United States and Canada websites, other than the Autolist website, (ii) Pacific Time for the Autolist website, (iii) Greenwich Mean Time for our U.K. websites, and (iv) Central European Time (or Central European Summer Time when daylight savings is observed) for our Germany, Italy, and Spain websites, which ceased operations in the second quarter of 2020. A session can be made up of multiple page views and visitor actions, such as performing a search, visiting vehicle detail pages, and connecting with a dealer. We believe that measuring the volume of sessions in a time period, when considered in conjunction with the number of unique users in that time period, is an important indicator to us of consumer satisfaction and engagement with our marketplace, and we believe it provides useful information to our investors because the more satisfied and engaged consumers we have, the more valuable our service is to dealers.

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Number of Paying Dealers

We define a paying dealer as a dealer account with an active, paid marketplace subscription at the end of a defined period. The number of paying dealers we have is important to us and we believe it provides valuable information to investors because it is indicative of the value proposition of our marketplace products, as well as our sales and marketing success and opportunity, including our ability to retain paying dealers and develop new dealer relationships.

Quarterly Average Revenue per Subscribing Dealer (QARSD)

We define QARSD, which is measured at the end of a fiscal quarter, as the marketplace subscription revenue during that trailing quarter divided by the average number of paying dealers in that marketplace during the quarter. We calculate the average number of paying dealers for a period by adding the number of paying dealers at the end of such period and the end of the prior period and dividing by two. This information is important to us, and we believe it provides useful information to investors, because we believe that our ability to grow QARSD is an indicator of the value proposition of our products and the return on investment, or ROI, that our paying dealers realize from our products. In addition, increases in QARSD, which we believe reflect the value of exposure to our engaged audience in relation to subscription cost, are driven in part by our ability to grow the volume of connections to our users and the quality of those connections, which result in increased opportunity to upsell package levels and cross-sell additional products to our paying dealers.

Adjusted EBITDA

To provide investors with additional information regarding our financial results, we monitor and have presented within this Annual Report on Form 10-K Adjusted EBITDA, which is a non‑GAAP financial measure. This non‑GAAP financial measure is not based on any standardized methodology prescribed by United States generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, and is not necessarily comparable to similarly titled measures presented by other companies.

We define Adjusted EBITDA as net income, adjusted to exclude: depreciation and amortization, stock‑based compensation expense, acquisition-related expenses, restructuring expenses, other income, net, and the provision for (benefit from) income taxes. We have presented Adjusted EBITDA within this Annual Report on Form 10-K because it is a key measure used by our management and board of directors to understand and evaluate our operating performance, generate future operating plans, and make strategic decisions regarding the allocation of capital. In particular, we believe that the exclusion of certain items in calculating Adjusted EBITDA can produce a useful measure for period‑to‑period comparisons of our business.

We use Adjusted EBITDA to evaluate our operating performance and trends and make planning decisions. We believe Adjusted EBITDA helps identify underlying trends in our business that could otherwise be masked by the effect of the expenses that we exclude. Accordingly, we believe that Adjusted EBITDA provides useful information to investors and others in understanding and evaluating our operating results, enhancing the overall understanding of our past performance and future prospects, and allowing for greater transparency with respect to key financial metrics used by our management in its financial and operational decision‑making. In addition, we evaluate our Adjusted EBITDA in relation to our revenue. We refer to this as Adjusted EBITDA margin and define it as Adjusted EBITDA divided by total revenue.

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Our Adjusted EBITDA is not prepared in accordance with GAAP, and should not be considered in isolation of, or as an alternative to, measures prepared in accordance with GAAP. There are a number of limitations related to the use of Adjusted EBITDA rather than net income, which is the most directly comparable GAAP equivalent. Some of these limitations are:

Because of these limitations, we consider, and you should consider, Adjusted EBITDA together with other operating and financial performance measures presented in accordance with GAAP.

The following table presents a reconciliation of Adjusted EBITDA to net income, the most directly comparable measure calculated in accordance with GAAP, for each of the periods presented.

Components of Consolidated Income Statements

Revenue

We derive revenue from two sources: (1) marketplace subscription revenue, which consists primarily of Listings and Dealer Display subscriptions, and (2) advertising and other revenue, which consists primarily of display advertising revenue from auto manufacturers and other auto‑related brand advertisers as well as partnerships with financing services companies.

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Marketplace Subscription Revenue

We offer multiple types of marketplace Listings packages to our dealers through our CarGurus U.S. platform (availability varies on our other marketplaces): Restricted Listings (formerly referred to as Basic Listings), which is free; and various levels of Listings packages, which each require a paid subscription under a monthly, quarterly, semiannual, or annual subscription basis.

Our subscriptions for customers generally auto-renew on a monthly basis and are cancellable by dealers with 30 days’ advance notice at the end of the committed term, although during the second quarter of 2020 we did not require 30 days’ advance notice of termination from dealers who cancelled as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Subscription pricing is determined based on a dealer’s inventory size, region, and our assessment of the connections and ROI the platform will provide them and is subject to discounts and/or fee reductions that we may offer from time to time. We also offer all dealers on our platform access to our Dealer Dashboard, which includes a performance summary, Dealer Insights tool, and user review management platform. Only dealers subscribing to a paid Listings package also have access to the Pricing Tool, Market Analysis tool and our IMV Scan tool.

In addition to displaying inventory in our marketplace and providing access to the Dealer Dashboard, we offer dealers subscribing to certain of our Listings packages other subscription advertising and customer acquisition products and enhancements, including Dealer Display, which is marketed under our Real-time Performance Marketing suite. With Dealer Display, dealers can buy display advertising that appears in our marketplace, on other sites on the internet and/or on Facebook, a highly converting social platform. Such advertisements can be targeted by the user’s geography, search history, CarGurus website activity (including showing a consumer relevant vehicles from a dealer’s inventory that the consumer has not yet discovered on our marketplace), and a number of other targeting factors, allowing dealers to increase their visibility with in-market consumers and drive qualified traffic for dealers.

We also offer paid Listings packages for the Autolist website and paid Listings and display products for the PistonHeads website.

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, we experienced a material adverse impact on our marketplace revenue as paying dealers cancelled their subscriptions with us (including, in some cases, with our permission prior to the end of the applicable contract term and notice period) and due to the fee reductions that we provided to customers for the April, May and June service periods in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in reductions in the overall transaction price. In May 2020, cancellations by paying dealers began to stabilize, which we believe resulted from the resumption of consumer activity as well as the fee reductions that we provided to our customers. In July 2020, we returned to normal contractual billings in all markets until subscription fees were reduced again for the December 2020 and February 2021 service periods for paying dealers in the United Kingdom.

Advertising and Other Revenue

Advertising and other revenue consists primarily of non-dealer display advertising revenue from auto manufacturers and other auto-related brand advertisers sold on a cost per thousand impressions, or CPM, basis. An impression is an advertisement loaded on a web page. In addition to advertising sold on a CPM basis, we also have advertising sold on a cost per click basis. Auto manufacturers and other brand advertisers can execute advertising campaigns that are targeted across a wide variety of parameters, including demographic groups, behavioral characteristics, specific auto brands, categories such as Certified Pre-Owned, and segments such as hybrid vehicles.

Advertising and other revenue also includes revenue from partnerships with certain financing services companies pursuant to which we enable eligible consumers on our CarGurus U.S. website to pre-qualify for financing on cars from dealerships that offer financing through such companies. We primarily generate revenue from these partnerships based on the number of funded loans from consumers who pre-qualify with our lending partners through our site.

We also offer non-dealer display products for the Autolist and PistonHeads websites.

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, we experienced a material adverse impact on our advertising revenue as some advertisers cancelled or reduced their advertising with us (including, in certain cases, with our permission prior to the end of the applicable contract term). In May 2020, cancellations by advertising customers began to stabilize, which we believe resulted from the resumption of consumer activity.

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In addition, a reduction in consumer visits to our sites during the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the delivery of fewer impressions for our advertising customers than anticipated, which caused an adverse impact on our advertising revenue.  This impact was partially offset by the increase in consumer visits over the remainder of the year to our sites as we increased our consumer marketing expenses in response to the recovery in consumer car shopping activity.

Revenue from partnerships with financing services companies was not adversely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

For a description of our revenue accounting policies, see “— Critical Accounting Policies and Significant Estimates.”

Cost of Revenue

Cost of revenue primarily consists of costs related to supporting and hosting our product offerings. These costs include salaries, benefits, incentive compensation, and stock-based compensation for our customer support team and third-party service provider costs such as data center and networking expenses, allocated overhead costs, depreciation expense associated with our property and equipment, and amortization of capitalized website development costs. We allocate overhead costs, such as rent and facility costs, information technology costs, and employee benefit costs, to all departments based on headcount. As such, general overhead expenses are reflected in cost of revenue and each operating expense category. Despite our implementation of the Expense Reduction Plan, we expect these expenses to increase as we continue to scale our business and introduce new products.

Operating Expenses

Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing expenses consist primarily of personnel and related expenses for our sales and marketing team, including salaries, benefits, incentive compensation, commissions, stock-based compensation, and travel costs; costs associated with consumer marketing, such as traffic acquisition, brand building, and public relations activities; costs associated with dealer marketing, such as content marketing, customer and promotional events, and industry events; amortization of internal-use software; and allocated overhead costs. A portion of our commissions that are related to obtaining a new contract is capitalized and amortized over the estimated benefit period of customer relationships. All other sales and marketing costs are expensed as incurred. We expect sales and marketing expenses to fluctuate from quarter to quarter as we respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and changes in the competitive landscape affecting our consumer audience and brand awareness, which will impact our quarterly results of operations.

Product, Technology, and Development

Product, technology, and development expenses, which include research and development costs, consist primarily of personnel and related expenses for our development team, including salaries, benefits, incentive compensation, stock-based compensation and allocated overhead costs. Other than website development and internal-use software costs as well as other costs that qualify for capitalization, research and development costs are expensed as incurred. Despite our implementation of the Expense Reduction Plan, we expect product, technology, and development expenses to increase as we invest in additional engineering resourcing to develop new solutions and make improvements to our existing platform.

General and Administrative

General and administrative expenses consist primarily of personnel and related expenses for our executive, finance, legal, people & talent, and administrative teams, including salaries, benefits, incentive compensation, and stock-based compensation, in addition to the costs associated with professional fees for external legal, accounting and other consulting services, insurance premiums, payment processing and billing costs, and allocated overhead costs. General and administrative costs are expensed as the products and services are provided. Despite our implementation of the Expense Reduction Plan, we expect general and administrative expenses to increase as we continue to scale our business.

Depreciation and Amortization

Depreciation and amortization expenses consist of depreciation on property and equipment and amortization of intangible assets.

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Other Income, Net

Other income, net consists primarily of interest income earned on our cash, cash equivalents, and investments, sublease income and net foreign exchange gains and losses.

Provision for (Benefit from) Income Taxes

We are subject to federal and state income taxes in the United States and taxes in foreign jurisdictions in which we operate. We have recorded a provision for income taxes for the year ended December 31, 2020 as a result of our consolidated taxable income position and recognized a benefit from income taxes for the year ended December 31, 2019 as a result of stock-based compensation benefits recorded. We recognize deferred tax assets and liabilities based on temporary differences between the financial reporting and income tax bases of assets and liabilities using statutory rates. We regularly assess the need to record a valuation allowance against net deferred tax assets if, based upon the available evidence, it is more likely than not that some or all of the deferred tax assets will not be realized. Our valuation allowances against our net deferred tax assets as of December 31, 2020 and 2019 were both immaterial.

Results of Operations

The following table sets forth our selected consolidated income statements data for each of the periods indicated. The period‑to‑period comparison of financial results is not necessarily indicative of future results.

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The following table sets forth our selected consolidated income statements data as a percentage of revenue for each of the periods indicated.