Company: TRUE
Filing Date: 2025-05-06
Form Type: 10-Q
Source: 0001327318-25-000016
Chunk: 250

Company: TrueCar, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-05-06
Form: 10-Q
Item: Part I, Item 8
Chunk 250
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 a user’s search, which may reduce the effectiveness of the keywords we have purchased. Search engines also frequently change and optimize the amount and placements of advertisements on a search results page which may impact the quantity and quality of traffic to our website. Further, we bid against our competitors and other advertisers for preferred placement on the search engines’ results pages. Many of our competitors have greater resources with which to bid and better brand recognition and consumer visibility than we do. We experience competition for paid advertisements, which increases the cost of paid Internet search advertising and as a result, our marketing and advertising expenses. Search engines may also adopt a more aggressive auction-pricing system for keywords that causes us to incur higher advertising costs or reduces our market visibility to prospective users. If paid search advertising costs increase or become cost-prohibitive, whether because of increased competition, pricing system changes, algorithm changes or otherwise, our advertising expenses could rise significantly, or we could reduce or discontinue our paid search advertisements. Moreover, the use of voice recognition technology such as Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri or the implementation of artificial intelligence into existing search engines such as Bing and Google may drive traffic away from traditional search engines, which could reduce traffic to our website. Any reduction in the number of users directed to our website through Internet search engines could harm our business and operating results.

Our users may in some cases require dealers who wish to communicate with them other than by email to communicate by text message rather than by phone call. If consumers or dealers do not see value in this functionality, or if it results in privacy concerns, our business could be negatively affected.  

We allow some of our users to choose how dealers contact them other than by email, whether both by telephone and by text message or only by text message. We believe that allowing users to select their methods of communication is beneficial to both consumers and dealers, but we cannot assure you that they will agree. To the extent that dealers perceive text-message connections to be less valuable, for example because dealers believe that they are able to sell fewer cars to our users when using it, our business and results of operations could be negatively affected.

Additionally, we use a third-party vendor to facilitate text message communications between our users and dealers, and we have access to those communications. If either we, or our third-party vendor, are perceived to violate our dealers’ or users’ privacy in connection with those communications, or any law or regulation that applies to those communications, our reputation and business could be harmed. For more information on this type of risk, refer