Future plc Aktie

Good morning, and thank you for joining us. I will start with some opening remarks, then hand over to Sharjeel, who will cover the half year results, and then I will update you on our strategic progress. So let's start with opening remarks. The search ecosystem is changing. We have been very open about it. However, this is only 16% of our total revenue. Focusing on the things that are in our control, our growth initiatives only launched 7 months ago are yielding new growing revenue geared to offset the decline in the 16%. This momentum is paving the way for organic growth.

Finally, core to our strategy, we are evolving our business model at pace, streamlining our business, making decisions faster, including killing projects that are not delivering. Of course, we also double down on the ones that are. We do this to reflect the changing market dynamics whilst preserving our unique capability to drive effective monetization to deliver sustainable profit and most importantly, cash. And with that, let me hand it over to Sharjeel.

Thanks, Kevin. Good morning, everyone. Let's get straight into the numbers. Revenue at GBP 349 million was down 8% year-on-year on a reported basis, with organic performance down 6% as previously communicated. Our EBITDA of GBP 83 million at a 24% margin reflects the change in revenue mix that we highlighted in the pre-close trading update. Adjusted EPS is lower, in line with that reduction in profit with the benefit of our share buybacks offset by the expected higher depreciation and financing costs.

The group continued to generate good cash conversion at 109% of EBITDA. And the balance sheet remains in good shape with leverage at 1.6x after having returned GBP 53 million to shareholders in this half and acquired SheerLuxe in the period as well. On to revenue. Overall, the group's organic revenue declined by 6% during the half year with similar declines across different divisions. As I mentioned at the pre-close, overall revenues in half year were in line with expectations, but the revenue mix within B2C has been different to what we planned for, with decline in higher-margin revenues offset by lower margin ones. There is a lot going on.

So let's get into the detail of each division. Starting with B2C. Note that the full B2C revenue breakdown is in the appendix. I know many of you enjoy the detail, so it's there for reference. Firstly, website sessions, which impact around 16% of the group's revenue. These were down 15% during the first half, mainly due to the year-on-year increase in AI overviews, which was anticipated, and these are now more stable at around 65% of our keywords. Changes on Google Search with organic results now appearing much further down the page and the recent algo updates, for example, the first-ever Discover algo in February.

These trends had a direct impact on programmatic ads and e-commerce. Programmatic was minus 17%, so about the same decline in sessions. However, there was good demand on direct advertising side. Direct grew at plus 8% during the half with a very strong Q2, both in the U.S. and the U.K., growing double digit. This is where we see the benefits of our strategic focus across brands, monetizations and innovation coming through. Our branded content deals are performing well with solid commercial execution across a range of clients.

And we are winning clients. Our wider audiences and distinctive products such as Future Optic and Helix are opening new doors. Remember, direct is twice the size of programmatic and comes with higher pricing. And when you add them together, total advertising declined 3%. Moving on to e-commerce. In H1, we saw e-commerce decline 24%, which is similar to the decrease we saw in H2. This was driven by lower sessions impacting the number of unique pay views, especially on our high-value technology reviews and buying guides, which is where most of our revenues come from.

Basket size has remained flat year-on-year with inflation offset by less high-value purchases. We have been actioning a number of growth initiatives in this area, and Kevin will give more color. Last but not least, magazines. Magazines have performed better than expectations at minus 4% overall. It is worth highlighting that subscriptions were flat in the first half of the year. Our initiatives in this area around subscriber acquisition and retention are now coming through in the financials. Newstrade remains negative as we continue to see changes on the high street.

Worth noting that excluding Rolex books, the magazines were overall down just 1% in the first half. This resilient performance demonstrates the strength and value of our premium and specialist brands, and we see this improvement as being sustainable. Moving on to Go.Compare. At circa GBP 90 million, this represents 1/4 of the group's revenues. Car insurance revenue was down minus 5% in the period, reflecting declines in the total quote volumes in switching as insurance premiums came down.

However, this was partially offset by improved conversion when users came to the site. And in March, we saw the car market return to growth. And this helped Q2 for car to be flat in the period, a sign that the trends over the past 12 months are now starting to reverse. Home insurance declined in this period and has remained challenging. However, Homes is around 6 to 9 months behind the car market in terms of behavior. So we anticipate this revenue trend to change in the coming months.

Renewal was launched in February to good reviews. Our aim with Renewal is to increase yearly retention rates and therefore, reduce our customer acquisition costs going forward. It is still very early days, and we will be using our Go.Compare database to drive more users as well as developing new features and incentives on the app. This is only one of the growth initiatives underway in price comparison. Again, more on this from Kevin later.

Turning to B2B on Slide 10. This represents 7% of the group with GBP 24 million of revenue. At the full year, I noted the improving trends in B2B as a result of our strategic progress, and we can see that in our Q2 performance. There are different trends across end market verticals with clients in tech, food and infrastructure spending more. However, other verticals have been less active, such as education, which has seen changes in U.S. government funding.

Despite those market segment movements, the business has benefited from progress on a number of strategic areas. We have unified our data, and this is helping us launch innovative commercial products that help solve our client problems. We now have unified go-to-market approach with the commercial team selling combined packages driving operating leverage. We are reaching more audiences that make our key decisions for our clients' products. We're also winning in AI with the commercial team selling Future Optic to our B2B clients. I wanted to highlight that Q2 was down minus 2%, with the business growing in March and the exit rate remains positive.

Turning to Slide 11, which highlights our P&L. I've already covered the main drivers on revenue and margins, but let me bring these together with the P&L. The group's gross margin of 71% is down 2 percentage points. The reduction reflects our change in revenue mix. In B2C, programmatic and e-commerce revenues are high margin and have minimal cost impact either way. Direct revenues grew strongly, but these have cost of sales to deliver the creative that is attached to those deals. Magazines did better than expected, but again, are at a lower margin.

In Go.Compare, we saw an increase in our PPC costs driven by 2 things: firstly, double-digit inflation from the Google auction, but we also had relatively more volume of paid clicks as compared to organic search clicks with Google using more space to monetize shopping and sponsored links. Combined sales, marketing and editorial and other costs were flat, higher as a result of annual pay increase and general inflation, offset by efficiency savings across the group.

On the topic of efficiencies, we will deliver our GBP 5 million target for the year, with savings coming across the group. We are focused on shaping the business differently and also using technology to automate our processes. We are on track to achieve GBP 20 million by FY '28. Right, on to cash. As I said when I joined and every result since, cash is my favorite topic. Future continued its strong cash performance, and we generated GBP 91 million in adjusted free cash flow after CapEx. And including tax, interest, exceptionals, Future had a net cash generation of around GBP 55 million in the first half.

We applied our capital allocation framework, spending GBP 40 million to acquire a fast-growing and platform-agnostic brand in SheerLuxe, and we returned GBP 53 million to shareholders through the dividend and share buybacks. After these, the group saw an increase in net debt to GBP 314 million, representing a leverage of 1.6x. Our cash generation is always strong in the second half, and we will use it to pay a top-up on the SheerLuxe acquisition due to its outperformance, finish our current fifth share buyback and reduced our overall net debt position.

Going forward, cash conversion is expected to remain strong. Remember, a large part of the group is not impacted by the changes in the search ecosystem. These businesses such as direct advertising, subscription and news trade magazines, Go.Compare and B2B all generate high levels of cash, and we will use that cash generation to delever down to the onetime floor. The group has committed facilities in place until 2029 and 2030, and we have plenty of liquidity to execute our strategy, which is a good segue to capital allocation.

Our capital allocation is unchanged, a balanced allocation that will invest in and drive organic revenue growth, have room for bolt-ons to accelerate the strategy, a more consistent return for shareholders through our annual dividend and return excess cash to shareholders via buybacks. All of these engines were in operational in the first half of the year. We will continue with this balanced allocation while maintaining a conservative and prudent approach to leverage. One final point before I move to the outlook.

As the Board highlighted, our group is fundamentally undervalued. We are actively progressing options to realize value for shareholders from brands or assets that do not drive our strategy. I wanted to note that we are very focused on creating value, and I look forward to updating you when I can share more specific information. Finally, turning to the outlook slides. Our outlook for the year remains the same as the pre-close update. We expect FY '26 organic revenues to be mid-single-digit decline. Declines in programmatic and e-commerce will be offset by good growth from our initiatives across the business, particularly in direct advertising.

In terms of margins, we are looking at 25% to 27% in EBITDA terms. As always, the group will continue to generate strong cash flows with the EBITDA conversion to around 90%. That cash will lower our overall net debt position at the year-end with leverage to be in line with consensus at around 1.6 to 1.7x. Leverage will then start to reduce to the onetime floor. In the medium term, we are confident in achieving our ambition of sustainable revenue growth and cash generation. I will hand over to Kevin, who will take you through our strategy and the momentum we are building to achieve that. Thank you.

Thank you, Sharjeel. Before I dive into the strategic progress, I just want to spend a few minutes with a brief reminder of our strategy. I know that future can seem like a complex business. However, at the core, it is very simple. It all starts with brands and their content, which drives valuable audiences that we monetize effectively through existing and new products. This operating model applies to all of our brands, and we create the platform effect by leveraging products and data across those brands.

Now this is unique to us, and our scalability is hard to replicate. Starting with brands and content, we are very clear where our value resides. We have market-leading brands across many verticals. Our human-originated content is valuable for our audiences wherever they are. We know that they can exist and be monetized successfully on multiple platforms, and we have this today already in our portfolio. We have been and continue to be immensely successful at monetizing our content.

As you are all aware, some of our existing monetization path, 16% of our revenue are being disrupted by changes to the search market. We are, therefore, building new monetization routes to be equally successful in this new era. To do this, we need to continue to innovate, bring new products to market, leverage AI to create new revenue streams, and we are and accelerate our pace of change. It is in our DNA. The value of our rich first-party data is invaluable also, and we are far from leveraging its full potential.

Our third strategic pillar is efficiency, and Sharjeel has mentioned our focus on driving it throughout the business. Again, this is in our DNA. Now taking a step back on brands and content. AI is transforming the way people are engaging with content. We know that. However, this is so critical to understand. In a world flooded with information, trust and expertise in content and brands are more important than ever. This is where we play and where we've always played. AI slop does not make money. Our content is human originated, meaning it is authentic, unique and curated and something that AI cannot replicate, demonstrating taste and opinion.

Our right to win lies with the expertise of our editorial and creative teams in generating this type of content and with the trust our brand commands. If you read a review on Tom's Guide, you know editors have properly and thoroughly tested the product and that they are giving you their independent expert view. Next, it is about being channel agnostic. We are moving at pace to get our brands to reach where people are. Why? Simply, the way people consume content is changing and so our distribution channels are evolving too. It is a must.

We are no longer just a magazine publisher. We are no longer just a website owners. Our legacy model, which is still highly valuable, was largely about audiences being pushed to us by being excellent at SEO. Today, it is about audiences coming to us on different mediums through the power of our market-leading brands. And you can see on the right-hand side of this slide, we are everywhere from social to apps, AI, LLMs down to podcasts. And we would expect this wheel to expand as new channels emerge.

Our second pillar is monetization. Our track record is one of effective monetization where we playbook a revenue stream and apply it to our entire portfolio. This mindset is unchanged. You can see the multiple revenue streams we have today. I just wanted to highlight 2 of them. In advertising, we are excellent at monetizing on our sites programmatically and directly. However, there are areas of digital advertising where we don't play at scale, such as video and the creator economy, and these are growing fast. This is a clear opportunity, and we have initiatives already underway.

Not only are we pivoting into higher growth markets, but we are also looking to outperform them. In print, we have now established a consistent track record of outperforming the magazine markets by focusing on brands, effective pricing and central to all of this, the customer value proposition. And whilst I will not go into detail on this today, I wanted to remind you how valuable repeatable revenue streams that can pass through inflation are. This is what we have in subscriptions. This wheel is not static. It will continue to evolve, especially as we are about to add data products as a revenue line and more on this later.

So operating in high-growth markets, combined with outperforming in declining markets drives an overall attractive growth prospect for the group. Now bringing it all together is our execution road map to deliver on our strategy following our 3 pillars of brands and content, monetization and efficiency. As you can see, since we launched last September, which is 7 months ago, we have made significant progress. These strategic initiatives that are now ramping up. There is momentum, and it is contributing to our P&L already.

Starting with brands and content. Brand transformation is critical to our future success, and we continue to drive these strategic initiatives forward at pace. As I highlighted earlier, our objective is for our brands to thrive across multiple channels well beyond just print or text-based websites. We segment our brands to ensure we focus resources by prioritizing the brands where it drives results at scale and more quickly, give teams clarity and focus on how their brands are managed. Transform at pace by building a transferable brand playbook that we refine at each transformation.

We have segmented our portfolio into 4 categories. In the half, we have already seen brands moving from category to another. So this is already happening, and we are seeing traction. Let's take them each in turn. Destination brands. These are growth brands whose content exists and is found by audiences across multiple channels. The majority of their revenue is driven by direct high-value advertising and e-commerce. We then have brands in transition. These are brands that are well advanced in their transformation, demonstrating green shoots. We then have nondiversified brands.

The majority of their audience and revenue are tied to Google or to print. These brands require a pivot to a channel-agnostic approach, moving them to the categories above in stages. And finally, portfolio brands. Simply put, these profitable brands run for cash to fund growth elsewhere. They are run extremely well, some outperforming their own market. Now this is not a static category. We have the example of Decanter, a former portfolio brand has now new routes for both profitable growth by driving world-leading events and subscription.

This is art, not science. Whilst we have a playbook, each brand is different and has a different audience makeup and therefore, transition time will vary from one to another. Our North Star is to make our brands destination brands, period. Let me give you some proof points. Starting with nondiversified brands, taking the example of the tech vertical and noting that not all tech brands are at the same level of transition. However, stepping back from this and at its core, this category of brands has tremendous value as exemplified by Tom's Guide, which is reaching over 30 million sessions a month.

And more broadly, our tech brands are trusted with significant reach and scale providing expert content. Technology is central to our lives. It is no longer just for the geeks, reinforcing the purpose of their content. Now it is about bringing new content formats to Tom's Guide and monetizing them effectively. Turning to brands in transition using the example of Kiplinger, which I talked about at our results in December. It has been transforming in the past 12 months and is firmly on its way to becoming a destination brand. A big driver of the change is a revised proposition aligned with how consumers access content as well as diversifying its audience targets.

This has resulted in the production of multichannel content such as driving Apple News as a channel, bringing 800,000 users through Collab and finally, leveraging the Kwizly acquisition to drive engagement through quizzes and puzzles. And this repositioning is paying off. Kiplinger is in growth overall despite being print heavy. It grew e-mail revenue by 33% in the half, and this brand is largely non-Google with almost 90% of its audience coming directly on multiple channels. And finally, taking the example of WhoWhatWear, which reaches 27 million valuable users a month is a digital-only brand.

It is continuing to grow its social reach by 3%, adding another 3% in the half. How WhoWhatWear monetizes is the epitome of a destination brand with over 90% of its ads and e-commerce revenue coming directly to us. And this is where the magic happens as advertisers buy brands, this allows us to justify a premium pricing. Most importantly, destination brands operate in highly attractive markets with social advertising growing at about 30% and the creator economy spend at about 25%. And for avoidance of doubt, SheerLuxe, which we bought earlier this year, is a destination brand. We are learning from SheerLuxe, which is powering our playbook to transition other brands and reinforce our leadership in fashion and beauty.

Now turning next to the second pillar of our strategy, monetization. As I mentioned earlier, our monetization wheel is effective, but we need to diversify how we earn revenue today given the headwinds in programmatic and e-commerce revenue. It is about becoming a destination for advertisers through 360 sales, including making money from AI driving e-commerce across channels and driving revenue from data products.

Not all of these are at the same level of maturity. This allows us to deliver today whilst also building for tomorrow, making our business sustainable. You might remember Future Optic from our full year results in December. To recap, the problem we are trying to solve here is a shift in the audience. Our brands and our customers are looking for visibility in large language models or LLMs. What we are doing here is making our content as visible to LLMs as it is in conventional search.

The fact that we are leaders in SEO, combined with the trust and authority of our brands gives us a competitive advantage. We are leaders in visibility at scale, and we are not just choosing the metrics that suit us. External data is saying it. Not only are we relevant at scale, we are the second largest publisher across AI platforms and #1 in ChatGPT. We are extremely relevant in our high-intent categories. For example, WhoWhatWear is the most visible fashion and beauty brands in AI according to Similarweb.

And just like ranking is important in SEO, visibility is important in LLMs. Not only are we visible, as a reminder, we are leaders and that visibility is monetizable. We transformed this knowledge into a bespoke advertising package for our clients, which is renewable because they need to remain visible in this new ecosystem. Since last December, this pipeline has grown and generated GBP 2 million in the half with more booked in H2, and we are on track to deliver GBP 10 million for the full year. This is contributing to our growth in direct advertising.

Catching up to this competitive advantage can be hard. And combined with our tech stack first-to-market position, brand trust and authority, we are creating in moat. Now Future Optic is not the only digital advertising innovation we are bringing to the table. Our first data product, Helix was launched in March this year and is already being sold, designed to transform billions of intent data signals into well-defined, well-known audiences that advertisers would pay a premium to reach and advertise to.

Simply put, it is a high-yield precision ad targeting solution, helping our advertising clients solve their ROI problems. Its performance has been more than satisfactory since launch in March this year. We see a 21% increase in click-through rates compared to non-Helix advertising ad impressions, and this is quite exciting. Secondly, we are also thinking differently. We're now combining Helix and Optic into an advertising bundle solution becoming a go-to destination for advertisers to reach a high-intent consumer base across channels.

And finally, I would like to briefly cover a nascent key initiatives we are driving data products. These are early days. This is high-growth, high-margin revenue streams geared towards solving client problems, whether they are retailers or platform businesses. This allows us to expand our addressable markets, creating an attractive growth opportunity. We're not leveraging our data to its full potential today, limiting it to advertising clients. So watch this space, more to come.

Next, we have been open about the challenges in e-commerce. but we are not standing still. We are driving initiatives to pivot this revenue stream. Future has been immensely successful at monetizing buying guides on web pages. We continue to optimize this revenue stream, but this is not enough. We are adding new channels to drive e-commerce revenue. So we are reimagining our e-commerce model by building new audiences and disrupting the new purchase journeys. Just like we want our content to be channel agnostic, we want our e-commerce proposition to be channel agnostic, too.

We have many initiatives live. So let me cover one initiative here. AI shopping with WhoWhatWear ChatGPT app to facilitate fashion and beauty shopping. I told you our strategy is about being where audiences are. Consumers increasingly turn to AI LLMs for recommendation, but not any recommendation, the trusted, unbiased opinion, and we are there. These are the first of many. And in true future fashion, we are building a playbook becoming sharper and more effective at each iteration, deploying them where they drive outcomes.

So far, I have been focusing on the B2C brands. So let me spend a bit of time on one of our biggest brands, Go.Compare. I want to showcase how we are driving growth and transforming it into a brand destination. Let me remind you of the value of the brand through its barriers to entry and why we think AI is not the threat that you may think it is. First, it is an FCA-regulated entity abiding by consumer duty. Second, to compare insurance policies, you need relationships with insurers to act as a go between for consumers and insurers, relationship we have built over 20 years.

Third, we are very transparent and hold to very strict standards when it comes to consumer data, and this drives brand trust. Now these are not easily replicable, reinforcing the good or compare moat. Now you might recognize the consumer funnel on the left-hand side of this slide. The name of the game, as mentioned before, is to drive efficient acquisition, conversion and retention. Any initiative we drive is to improve one of these metrics. On the right-hand side of the slide, you can see the pipeline of activities from relaunching renewal to launching our first ChatGPT app and also launching signal on Go.Compare website.

We continuously leverage our technology to drive innovation with the clear intent and purpose of becoming a winner in agentic AI further down the line. The first version of our ChatGPT Go.Compare app has now launched. We view this as a new potential acquisition channel. It is important to acknowledge 2 things here. First, we will not compromise on regulation. This is a moat in insurance and one that is crucial to protecting consumers. Two, our aim is to lay a strong foundation to deliver continuous innovation at pace. And to do that, we need to build a strong AI infrastructure that talks to AI. Now we are excited about what we have brewing here.

Finally, I wanted to showcase today what we are doing to drive new revenue by adding a spoke to the Go.Compare monetization wheel. Consumers are increasingly looking for savings given the current backdrop. This is why they come to Go.Compare in the first place. Given the cost of customer acquisition, we are looking to increase the return on this by adding a secondary revenue stream, leveraging signal, one of our strategic initiatives with our product reviews from our B2C brands and our AI capabilities to offer consumers an easy product price comparison on Go.Compare.

Finally, to wrap up, we have a clear plan, and we are focused on executing it. We're driving our brand and content strategy through our brand transformation to reach audiences wherever they are. We are driving our monetization strategy, adding new and evolving existing revenue streams. And we are doing so in an efficient and financially disciplined way. Momentum is building, and we are creating our path back to organic growth. Thank you for listening. We will now open the call for questions. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is from Nick Dempsey from Barclays.

I've just got one question. You showed us back at the full year results that Google Discover was a really important source of your traffic. You referred to the algorithm change for that. It kind of makes sense to me that Google Discover should be a place where your content is surfaced well because people are interested in cycling your content, you dominate cycling, your cycling content should turn up in Google Discover. In your discussions with them, what have you learned about why Google Discover seems to be impacting your traffic and other people's traffic as a result of that algorithm? And is there a hope that, that can change so that we can get a benefit from that coming months?

Thank you, Nick, for your question, and good to have you on the call. With regards to Google Discover, it's -- as Sharjeel mentioned, right, we've had the Google Discover first time algo update back in February in true future traditional fashion. We are reactive to it. We optimize and understand what works, what doesn't actually work and then refine from there going forward, one. Number two is, it is worth reminding that our performance in Google Discover is down to what the consumers' needs and wants to fulfill their purpose and their passion. And in those brands that you've highlighted, they meet that requirement.

Yes. Nick, so there was the very first algo update in Google Discover. And like all other algo updates, even on the core search, you learn what's changed and you adapt. Just as Kevin just said, things we noticed this time, there were more links to YouTube and X in this particular one. There's now a bit of advertising on Discover. That's a new feature as well. You -- when you scroll down, you'll see advertising in there as well.

Overall, it still performs very well for us. And while it is a bit more volatile and we saw some loss in February after the algo update, it remains a good one. And in terms of percentages, the pie I showed last time, that's pretty much still the same as it was previously.

Our next question is from Jessica Pok from Peel Hunt.

Can you hear me okay?

We can hear you.

Yes. I've got 3, please. The first one is just on the brands in transition. I mean, can you give us an idea of within this bunch, how much of the revenues are generated from direct now? And I guess, when you look at the transition, how quickly do you think these brands can transition and go into the kind of upper tier? And then the second one is just on the nondiversified brands. I know you're kind of looking at that and plans long term.

But for this set of titles or assets, can we expect that there's probably more than one route for it, i.e., could they move down to just the cash generators over the longer term, if you see opportunity, could they be sold or even if they kind of fail further, that could they be disposed or closed? And then the final one is just on data as a product. Can you just give us a glimpse or an example as to how this would work? And what kind of data would you provide to, for example, a retailer?

Yes. Thank you, Jessica, for your question. Good to have you on the call. First thing on brand transition, right? It's worth reminding, as I said in my presentation that we are moving at pace to move up, right, number one. And number two is every brand is different. Why? Because, a, their audience is different; two, b, their market is different; and then three, the clients can also be different. So as I said, it is an art, not a science. However, our focus, Sharjeel and I and the rest of the company is to focus on execution and delivery, moving at pace, ensuring that we take learnings as we go.

And over time, we shall be moving that up. And if you look at the slides that I presented is that we have made more than suitable progress since FY '25 in shifting across these brands up. With regards to the nondiversified brands, first of all, I must be clear in that not every brand needs to move up. Two, some are, as you said, cash generators, but it is worth reminding ourselves that every brand is profitable.

Three is that, as I mentioned in my presentation today, is that where brands that have new revenue streams or new revenue routes through a change in their proposition towards the customer and offering a new value proposition like Decanter and Wallpaper as examples, we will move them out and then grow them.

And finally, on data products. The simple answer here is we use data segment them, analyze them, package them to achieve 3 goals. The first one is to increase the yield of our existing products. The second goal is to actually help other partners that be retailers and/or platform businesses to enrich their own monetization strategy with our data. And three is also helping us drive better and more diversified advertising.

Just to add, Jessica, just to plant some numbers and there's some clues in the deck, which will help you. When you look at destination brands, if we go to Slide 23, you can see WhoWhatWear 92% direct revenue. And if you look at SheerLuxe, that's even higher, right, close to 100% and then on brands in transition, again, keeping on the same slide, we've picked out Kiplinger, and that's 86% non-Google. There will be a range, right? Some will be in that range, some will be lower than that.

And then to your point around nondiversified, well, we've pulled out Tom's Guide and that's 68% of its revenues from website sessions, right? So most of that was not direct. And that's the exciting part, and that's the job, right? We've got to transition a lot of these brands from nondiversified up the chain. And as Kevin said in the presentation, we have a clear playbook. We know how to do this, and we are very strongly on driving those up the chain, especially in the tech vertical.

Our next question is from William Larwood from Berenberg.

Just 3, please. Firstly, on your expectations of sort of gross contribution margins over the next 1 to 2 years would be helpful. Secondly, sort of just in terms of trends in programmatic and e-commerce that you're seeing in April. I know it's April and May, that would be helpful. And then finally, just in terms of the savings that you talked about, the GBP 5 million savings, how much of that benefit is going to be expected in H2?

Thank you for your question, Sharjeel?

I think all 3 of mine, aren't they? I'll take them all. In terms of expectations on gross margin, it's too early for me to start predicting next year, the year after. We normally do that with our full year results. I think for now, Will, if you take where we are at about 70%-71%, I think that's about right for now. And I'll update the market once we start getting through our budget cycle and I get some visibility into next year, and we'll see the momentum start to come through for all the things that Kevin has spoken about.

In terms of e-commerce and programmatic, what have I seen and on audience as well? Look, April was relatively more stable. The Google Core algorithm update in end of March, early April was relatively neutral for future. That said, audiences remain volatile. We had a couple of good weeks, then you have a slightly weaker week. So it remains volatile, and that's what makes it difficult to call, right?

I'd like to stand here and tell you the future of Future. But actually, it remains volatile. But what's not happening is it's not accelerating, right? We're seeing the decline year-on-year, but it's becoming more stable. And that's not me saying, you will have heard other people say something similar as well. But rather than fixate just on audiences on e-commerce, can I point you to the things that Kevin talked about, Go.Compare living in terms of adding another channel. You've got things like the WhoWhatWear ChatGPT app, which will go live next week, in terms of, again, attracting more audience. And that product and signal allows you to be in different places going forward.

Multichannel...

Multichannel. In terms of the savings, the vast majority of that will come in the second half of the year. Our headcount has reduced substantially in the first half of the year. We've added, obviously, SheerLuxe in terms of head. We've had more tech and engineers building the products. But under the core, we've reduced our headcount across teams, whether it's in sales, marketing, editorial, finance, legal, all of the teams across the piece, and that should start coming in the second half of the year that GBP 5 million.

We will now move to our next question from Alastair Reid from Investec.

So 3 for me. Firstly, could you just sort of update us on the kind of success and usage of Renewal within Go.Compare? Sort of any more color there? And then secondly, on Go.Compare, you sort of mentioned your sort of relationships with the insurers. Can you perhaps talk about the importance of those relationships in insurers choosing to use you as a source of customers rather than potentially them interacting directly with an LLM? And then lastly, I think you sort of said that AI Overviews were up to about sort of 65% of queries. How do you think about the trajectory of that? Do you think that's starting to plateau now?

Sorry, could you repeat your last question, please?

I think Sharjeel mentioned that AI Overviews were now about 65% of queries. I'm just wondering sort of your thoughts on the trajectory, whether that might be starting to plateau now.

Okay. Thank you for your questions. I'll take the first one. In terms of the success in Renewal, right, as I mentioned, we've launched it in March. And thus far, we have migrated existing Google customers successfully onto the Renewal, and we're taking the learnings very fast. We are implementing, sorry, those learnings in order to refine the proposition. We are on track for year FY and in terms of our objective, which is to actually migrate hundreds and thousands of good customers onto it.

And as Sharjeel mentioned, we will continue to innovate and grow Go.Compare. And within Renewal, we are literally at this moment in time, developing new initiatives in order for us to deliver the right value proposition. So please watch this space. We will give you a very firm and concrete update at year-end.

Shall I take the other 2?

Please.

Yes. So in terms of insurers, I think the key thing to say there, look, it's a symbiotic relationship. GCSE is very much on my mind with the biologics out yesterday. So it's important that we work with insurers and they work with us, right? We provide them good channel to reach customers. So I see that carrying on. You raised a really interesting point on LLM visibility. And this is a key strength for us. Guess who has the LLM visibility in ChatGPT, in Gemini, in Perplexity, Claude, all the things, that's future.

And we've been working on Go.Compare ourselves, right, the Future Optic product that we've got. We've applied it to Go.Compare. So Go.Compare in itself has really strong visibility. So it plays to our strength. And we look forward to keeping those relationships healthy with the insurers as well. On AI overviews, I'll take that one, Kevin, as well, yes. So 65% of our keywords have an AI Overview. When it has an AI Overview, the page dynamics, obviously, organic search results go down and the click-through rate is lower. That's been relatively more stable again. The rate of increase over the last 2, 3 months is fairly stable. It's volatile. It's actually gone down over the last couple of weeks, but it's relatively stable. It is not growing at the same pace as it was growing previously. It went from 0 to 60 very quickly, and it's remained relatively more stable over the last couple of months.

And just to build on what Sharjeel has just said, it is worth reminding that we are leaders in citation provider within AI Overviews and in the verticals in which we operate.

We'll now move to our next question from Weng Lum Khoo from Jefferies.

Two, if I may, please. So firstly, one of the slides on WhoWhatWear, I think it was 3% growth in social media followers. I appreciate it's not the same metrics, but some of your peers are reporting high double-digit, even triple-digit growth in engagement on their social platforms. I was wondering if you could give a little bit more color there in terms of are you underperforming your peers? Or is there anything that you could highlight in terms of these other engagement metrics?

Second question will be e-commerce affiliates. I appreciate the color on why it's down 20% year-on-year. Is that just the case of the consumer buying less earphones? Or are they just buying earphones on ChatGPT or just going direct to Apple to buy said earphones. Is there anything -- any color that you could share on why e-commerce affiliate revenue is down 20% when some of your peers who are perhaps more geared to fashion beauty are growing. So is that again another example of why you guys are down 20%?

Thank you for your question. I'll take the first one. In terms of the WhoWhatWear and the engagement question that you've got. So great question. I think it's worth taking step back and looking at what Future and how we operate. There is one thing which is about, let's say, visibility. There's another thing which is about growth in engagement. But at Future, right, our operating model is about doing both increasing those, but also critically though, is monetization, right?

We are very clear where we stand. There is no point for us to grow engagement that we can't monetize, right? And therefore, whilst we look at the market and take stock and learnings, our focus is to grow engagement that we can monetize. And our focus is to grow AI visibility, let's say, using Future Optic that we can monetize successfully. So I think those monetization and audience work hand in hand. And that's my answer to you.

I'll take the e-commerce one. So this is a key focus of us, as you can imagine, with the revenues being down around 24%. The thing to remember here is it all starts at the top of the funnel, how many unique page views do you get? And what we've seen is, especially in our tech vertical, we've seen a significant drop on the number of people coming at the top of the funnel, so coming to our websites. And that's resulted in the main decline. What's really interesting is actually you know other people have increased. We have also increased in fashion beauty and homes. I can see, for example, clothing is up. I can see music and photography is up. So it's around the mix in e-com.

Part of it are growing. Music is growing. Photography is growing. Fashion is growing. But where we've seen the steeper decline is around the technology piece where there's less people coming to our website. And this is why it is critical that we use the platform and Signal to move away from being just a website-based e-commerce company to being much more platform channel agnostic around apps, around ChatGPT, around social.

So that work on technology is a specific focus for myself, Kevin and the team here. In terms of order value, it's been relatively stable. People are buying slightly less expensive kits. But actually, when you look at the average order value, it's relatively stable, as I said. So it's revenue mix issue for us rather than one -- people buying more on LLM. I don't necessarily see that. I think it's more how many people come to the funnel.

Our next question is from Johnathan Barrett from Panmure Liberum.

A few questions. I guess first one to Kevin and then to Sharjeel. First one, just wanted to get your views on how the limits on fair use are emerging in the legal environment and how you might see the big publisher case that's been taken out against Meta, is that relevant to you, do you think? Could it help you? Would you get involved? I'd like to understand your feelings about that.

And then on to the 2 sort of financial questions. Can you just talk us through your thoughts on how the EBITDA margin of GoCo will evolve this year, next year and sort of medium term, given the PPC pressure issue there that doesn't look like it's going to go away? And the second financial question, just on the deleveraging plan, does that mean that we should assume that there are no further buybacks, all other things being equal at this point?

Thank you, Johnathan, for your questions. I'll take the first one. Look, we like everything, we watch and we take stock of what's happening on the market and externally. And in this case, as you mentioned, the cases around Meta and we follow that, right? And we are not -- we don't have a position to take in terms of whether we join or not join. The thing that I wanted to remind you and everyone on the call is that critical for us is focusing on our control, Johnathan, which is execution and deliver on the outcome, work in the strategy and delivering on our goals, right? We are making good progress on this as we showcased today. And in part, we have green -- greener shoots which is promising. And therefore, that's what we are here for and need this business towards that. Thank you.

Right, Johnathan. Two questions. PPC and Go.Compare medium term guidance. I'm going to repeat what I said earlier, too early to give a view on what next year and indeed what the years after look like. In terms of the margin this year, I see it in the range it is at the moment, maybe a little bit better, but actually it's there or thereabouts. Remember, it's a very operating leverage business.

So actually, if the car market continues to return, the home market starts to turn around, that margin will start to pick up naturally as well. But in terms of how we think about it, again, it's about attracting people. We launched new marketing events across TV, across YouTube, across radio. We are still within our This Morning sponsorship. We launched Renewal to improve long-term retention. So lots going on there.

In terms of diversifying.

Yes, lots going on there. I think for now, I'll keep my mouth dry and say that we're focused on delivering this year, and then we will update you on margins going forward. In terms of deleveraging, look, we're still doing a buyback. It's not like we're not doing a buyback. We still got GBP 20 million from the 1st of April to do of the GBP 30 million fifth share buyback. Once that completes and the Board will have another look. The focus for me at the moment is deleveraging back down to that 1x floor. We're at 1.6x at half year. We'll generate another GBP 45 million of what I call free free cash.

We've got SheerLuxe the top-up to pay. We've got the fifth share buyback to finish that will take GBP 20 million. Net debt will come down a bit in terms of the total amount. The EBITDA a day is a bit lower this year compared to last year. So it will remain at about 1.6x for the full year. And then with the strength of our cash across direct, B2B, GoCo, the magazines, we'll have another solid cash generation year next year, and we'll delever down to that 1x floor. And as the Board looks ahead and we are deleveraging, we're being prudent with our balance sheet, we will make another decision on a buyback in the future.

Can I just ask you a follow-up question on that, please? With regards to mapping your leverage position going forward, are you assuming that the improvement in working capital in H1, which is obviously very strong is sustainable that improvement, so that in other words, you would expect leverage to even lower than where probably -- well, certainly where I am and perhaps where consensus is. Is that a reasonable assumption?

So going forward, 90% of EBITDA, we had a very strong first half of the year. We managed our working capital very strongly. I think for the full year, you should plan at about 90% conversion. The first half, we had about GBP 55 million of free free cash after all CapEx, interest, tax, exceptionals. In the second half, I think that's closer to about GBP 45 million. We'll have a higher EBITDA, but the cash conversion will even out across the year at about 90% across the year. I see that 90%, 95% is ongoing stable.

Okay. But the working capital point in isolation is quite a big factor. I mean, is that sustainable, that gain?

90%, yes. So of our cash, 90% will convert into profit. Yes, that is sustainable.

I'll pick up on that later.

Give me a call afterwards, I'll talk you through it. But we've had -- it's 109% of this half. What I'm saying is that the full year will be about 90%. I see that as our annual ongoing. It might be better than that. But at the moment, plan for 90% and put it through your waterfall and you'll see what I'm saying in terms of you'll end up with a slightly lower net debt position at the year-end, but leverage remaining at about 1.6x given the math on EBITDA.

I did have a fourth question, if I can be cheeky. Just a more vanilla cyclical question. Are you concerned about the inflation in consumer technology products sort of impacting demand and therefore, impacting volumes in e-commerce? And maybe that's already affecting you. Maybe you've already see that, but just wondered about your thoughts on that.

Well look, I think the way I would describe it is, inflation is a thing, but GDP actually was a slightly higher read this morning than, is my understanding. So these things will ebb and flow. And you've got people who bought a lot of kit in '20, 2021. That's coming up for a refresh as well. People are using kit very differently, cycles are different. So I think all of those when you add in the mix, I think it'll carry on a little tomorrow.

And to actually build on what Sharjeel was saying is that from a strategic point of view, we're managing e-commerce, which is making -- ensuring that our e-commerce proposition is multichannel Johnathan. It's worth reminding is that yes, there are new emerging purchase journeys, but we -- and we are gearing ourselves, right, to ensuring that we are partaking in those new emerging purchase journeys and also look forward to disrupting them like we did on websites using Hawk. This time, we're going to do that with Signal. That's point number one.

The point number two is brand and content strategy, that pillar, which is transforming our brands to becoming brand destination. At the core, as what we've said is the value proposition, what value proposition means for the customers is that what are they getting in return that they can't get anywhere else, right? And look, on Tom's Guide, one of our flagship brands, right, we've just launched Tom's Guide Savings, right, which is a focused project, which is focusing on firm value exchange, taking into consideration the market dynamics, the economic climate and the volatility of the world, if I may say so, right? So therefore, we are thinking customer first and clients and therefore gear them into creating the right moments in our e-commerce in order to help them purposely. I thought I should add this.

I'll tell you what Johnathan can ask a fifth question. I'll move on. Look at Go.Compare Living. What does that do? It helps people be savvy on TVs, laptops and phones. So there's different ways to attract people. Let's move on. Thank you Johnathan, give me a call.

We'll now take our next question from Andy Renton from Cavendish.

So a couple left from me. So just given the pace of change of AI, are there any new efficiencies you've recently identified on the cost base side? And more broadly, have your assumptions around what AI will be able to do changed at all? And then for Sharjeel, so just given online uncertainty around the top line trajectory, are there any discussions around reducing that 1x net debt floor?

Thank you very much for your question. I'll take the first one. No, it is evidence, right? And everyone knows that feels it talks about it. The pace of change with AI is phenomenal, right? As a reminder, the Future is and operating model is geared towards is armed with flexibility, pragmatism and agility, right? And we have embraced AI, not just the front shop by leveraging AI to make new products, increase yield in advertising, but also monetizing AI is transformed in ChatGPT. But as per your question, what are we doing with AI in the back office, right?

As Sharjeel said, GBP 5 million on track for this financial year includes utilization of AI. But let me give you a bit of color in terms of how we're doing it. It's not just prompting AI in and there you get the savings. It is reimagining our operating model, understanding where -- what our processes are today, how the processes should evolve over time and what is therefore the role of AI in these processes, end-to-end process. And there I say we are -- we started the utilization in our finance department. And reassuringly, we're making due progress, and it is working for us. And of course, we are expanding that across other functions in our organization. And again, may I say, at pace.

Just to clarify the question, Andy, you mean reducing the floor as in having less debt, right, going down to 0.5x something is that?

Yes, yes, below the 1x, yes. Just given with top line, top line does sort of trend lower for a year or so, whatever, just the impact that's going to have on that ratio and whether it's better to try and target a lower than 1x.

Okay. Let me take it back a step and then I'll come back to your specific question. The beauty of Future, and look and again, I've said this when I joined, is its immense cash generation. The bit that is impacting us, the one you referenced to in terms of lower revenue is about 16% of the business today. The rest of the business, it has ups and downs, and you can see that in our results. But it generates tremendous cash that we know is coming.

Magazines and subscriptions, minus 1%, relatively flat. We've got direct business growing at 8%, double digit in the second quarter, exit rate positive on B2B, Go.Compare, car market turning around, home market hopefully will follow soon. These engines give us strong cash generation. So I'm going to be focused on getting down to the 1x floor by using the remainder of this year and into next year's cash generation. We don't have a DB scheme. We have a dividend, which is at GBP 15 million, GBP 16 million.

That cash generation starts to delever very quickly as we go into next year. And as we go into next year and we have visibility on our performance, the momentum on the strategic initiatives, how the economic outlook is looking for the world and geopolitics, the Board can then take an informed decision on the leverage position, but also to Johnathan's earlier question about future buybacks. But my focus at the moment is to be prudent and conservative and go towards that 1x floor. And as we get there, we can make a decision.

We'll now take our last question today from Lara Simpson from JPMorgan.

Most have actually been answered. So maybe just to come back and push you a little bit more on the profitability and margins. You've obviously reiterated the guidance for 25% to 27% on a full year basis, which leaves quite a wide range on H2. So I suppose why the need for such a wide range or why such low visibility in the second half? And Sharjeel, maybe if you could just walk us through some of your key assumptions and the building blocks that H2 profitability. I know we've got the GBP 5 million annualized savings coming through, but what are some of the key puts and takes there?

And then maybe just coming back on capital allocation. You've clearly, haven't signaled quite a strong message on portfolio optimization and reviewing brands and assets across the portfolio. So we'll wait for an update on that. But if something was to crystallize, how would you be thinking about capital allocation in that scenario? Would the focus still be on deleveraging to 1x? Or would you potentially look to be opportunistic on acquisitions? Do you feel the business is ready to pursue another deal similar to [ CLX ] will very much be deleveraging and potentially returns given where the stock is trading and how business operations are?

I think you're looking for both of those ones. Okay. So here we go. The range, 25% to 27%. look, things remain volatile on the audience side. We talked about the Discover algo. We talked about the Google Core algo. We have a couple of good weeks, weaker week. So things remain relatively volatile. What's on the good side on the positive side, Future Optic is doing very well. We've got a strong booked number for that. Helix has just launched. Go.Compare is starting to return to growth. Exit rate on B2B has been positive in March, April and May.

So there's a lot of moving factors here, and that's why the range is in that 25% to 27%. And as we progress through the year, we'll know more. And then again, we'll update you in the trading update in September. But for now look, we are focused on delivering the guidance we have issued. We're confident in delivering the guidance we have issued. And we want to transition those brands up the chain. We want to monetize in a 360 way, and we want to carry on innovating because that's what's helping us win.

At the moment, it's 25% to 27% guidance. And as we go into next year, I'll update everyone on that in the future. On the portfolio, look, I don't want to count the cash before we have it, right? We are actively progressing options on brands and assets. When I can talk more about it when we have something more specific, I'll let you know. But the great thing is, in the meantime, I'm going to generate a ton of cash. And secondly, whether we use it to pay the RCF down, whether we do something more interesting on shares or buybacks or bonds or keep on to cash at a gross level and do something else? I don't know.

The focus is let's progress with those value unlocks for our shareholders. The Board has said, our share price is fundamentally undervalued, and we are going to do something about it. And when I can talk about it, I'll tell you what it is, and I'll tell you what I'm going to do with the money.

Thank you very much, everyone, for joining this call. I hope you found our presentation useful, clear and accessible to all. And also thank you on behalf of myself and Sharjeel for all of your questions and found our answers satisfactory. Thank you.

Thanks, everyone.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to today's Future plc preclose trading update call. My name is Seb, and I'll be the operator for your call today. [Operator Instructions].

I will now hand you over to Kevin Li Ying to begin the call. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us at short notice. We really do appreciate it. When we reported our FY '25 results last December, we were clear where our exposure to the search landscape sat, namely programmatic advertising and e-commerce. And we set out the challenges in that part of the market as a result of the changes in the ecosystem. What we've seen is that rather than stabilize year-on-year, it has just become tougher with organic search results being further down, the Google search page driving more zero-click search impacting our sessions. This is a challenge, not just for us, but for the industry. We remain cautious in our outlook on sessions and expect continued decline rather than stabilization of trends.

In addition to this, PPC inflation, which we noted in February, remains higher. This is another industry issue, but clearly, it has an impact on Go.Compare's profitability. To give you some color on this, PPC costs are double digit higher year-on-year. And as you know, these are high-margin parts of the business. However, as a reminder, over 80% of the group's revenue is not directly correlated to audiences. And on the other hand, where we are able to exert greater control is against our strategic initiatives. As planned, these are driving growth and ramping up.

Just to quote a few, our AI visibility advertising product, Future Optics, is building momentum, some of it landing in H1 and more than double in H2. We have a strong pipeline. Earlier this month, we launched Helix, our next-generation first-party data audience intelligence engine designed to drive guaranteed commercial outcomes for advertisers. Following successful testing across 20 campaigns, we are seeing double-digit increase in click-through rates alongside meaningful improvements in return on ad spend. We are rolling this product out at pace in the U.S. and then on to the U.K.

On to SheerLuxe, which we acquired in January, is trading very strongly, outperforming our plans, testament that the Google-Zero strategy works. This is amplified with our own Google-Zero brands like Kiplinger and Ideal Home, which are also driving outperformance. We continue to manage Magazines efficiently, delivering another very resilient performance. And then on to Go.Compare, which has returned to growth in March, thanks to growth in car insurance, and we launched Renewal, our insurance wallet app in February, and we're working on a pipeline of new features, including AI functionality to push to it.

As a reminder, Renewal is all about improving retention and lowering customer acquisition costs by PPC. And finally, the rate of decline in B2B is abating and is set to grow in H2 with the benefit of new first-party data and AI-led products. However, these initiatives, our strategic initiatives, whilst driving growth, are not yet sufficient to offset the macro downside from sessions given the acceleration decline there.

So let me hand it over to Sharjeel to talk through what this means for guidance.

Thank you for joining us this morning. First, turning to the outlook for the half year. On half year organic revenues, we are broadly in line with where we thought around minus 6.5%. However, the revenue mix at half year is different with more revenues coming from direct digital advertising and print and less from higher-margin e-commerce and programmatic, which has resulted in a margin at around 24% to 25%. Looking forward to the full year, we are deliberately taking a cautious view on audiences in the second half, even though we have easier comparators in the coming H2 period.

The key change is that we're now planning for audience to decline going forward instead of stabilizing in H2 as we had planned. Given the ongoing volatility in audiences, this is a prudent thing to do. So for H2, we are assuming a continued decline in e-commerce and programmatic revenues, similar to the rate of decline we saw in the past 2 halves. These are the high-margin revenues which we highlighted as being more directly linked to audiences.

On the other areas, there is growth in the business. We expect direct digital advertising, both in the U.K. and in the U.S. to deliver good growth in H2, assuming macro conditions remain consistent. We expect Magazines to remain resilient for the rest of the year. We expect Go.Compare to grow throughout H2, as it had done in March. Remember, in an inflationary environment, we see that Go.Compare grows, and we expect B2B to return to growth in H2 as we launch new products. So all of this translates into H2 organic revenue being down low single digits. And on the inorganic side, you will have a full 6-month inclusion of SheerLuxe, which continues to outperform, as Kevin just mentioned.

Turning to the full year profit. The impact of the B2C revenue mix, combined with the PPC inflation in Go.Co is expected to result in an EBITDA margin in the region of 25% to 27%. I want to assure you all that we're being very proactive when it comes to costs. We are driving automation across the business and reducing costs, but also continuing to invest where it drives a good return.

Regarding cash, the group continues to generate high levels of cash with conversion for the year in line with guidance of around 90% of EBITDA to adjusted free cash flow. This is the same as the previous 95% in AOP terms. The Board is clear that our shares are fundamentally undervalued and we will use this strong cash generation to buy our shares, it's the best investment today. And given the share price, we have decided to accelerate the current GBP 30 million share buyback program. We still have GBP 22 million to go on this.

And with that, back to Kevin.

Thank you, Sharjeel. Before taking your questions, I just wanted to take a step back from the detail to look more broadly where we are at. Notwithstanding today's disappointing news, taking a step back, this is a business that still generates a strong level of EBITDA and a net free cash flow of circa GBP 100 million. This is not a set of numbers reflected in our valuation. With this in mind, we're going to be even more focused on driving value for the areas of the group that deliver the platform effect and to realize value for shareholders from those that do not. As I said earlier, this is working, but we want to make sure that it works faster and at a greater scale.

With that, Sharjeel and I would be happy to take any of your questions you might have. Operator, over to you.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question on the line is from Nick Dempsey with Barclays.

I've got 2 questions. So first of all, I think back at the full year results, you were making quite a clear distinction between Google Discover and Google Search. Are those lines starting to blur now as your traffic from Google Discover starting to be hit by changes to that as we've seen from some other people. So is that part of the reason for the traffic weakness?

And the second question, you just mentioned sort of net free cash flow. Did you say circa GBP 100 million? I just want to try and understand what the definition of that is? Are we including the buyback in that? Or that seems lower than I would have expected based on your guidance?

Thank you, Nick, for your 2 questions. Sharjeel, did you want to pick the Discover piece versus organic and net free cash flow?

Yes, I'll pick up both of them. So Nick, on audiences, what we've seen is overall audiences have been down in the first half of about minus 20%. That's pretty much in line with what we saw in the second half of last year. There are variances between how audiences on Discover and how audiences on Google Search have performed relatively similar. I mean, overall, it's down minus 20%. It's not that one is up and the other is down. Both of them are down, but they remain very volatile and hence, the guidance today.

Going forward, we'll see. We're taking a cautious view. We had previously assumed that audiences would stabilize, be it Discover or be it search. But what we're saying now is instead of that stabilization on year-on-year, we're assuming, look, it just carries on declining, not accelerating, but carries on declining in the same trend we've seen over the past 2 halves.

On free cash flow, that doesn't include the buyback. That GBP 100 million is what we've got left after paying tax, interest, managing the business in terms of working capital. It's what the Board can decide to do in terms of dividends, share buybacks, acquisitions, bolt-ons and so forth. So that's the definition of GBP 100 million.

So sorry, it includes cash interest, cash tax and the buyback?

No, excludes the buyback.

Excludes the buyback, but includes cash interest and cash tax?

Yes.

Our next question comes from Lara Simpson with JPMorgan.

I just had 2. The first was, again, just coming back to the outlook. You've obviously assumed for continued audience decline in H2. Could you just talk a bit more around the level of visibility that you have and how you have confidence that, that decline can't actually accelerate in the second half. So what are you seeing from the Q2 exit rate? And then I think also important just to address the midterm financial algorithm at this stage. Clearly, we've had the margin reset given the change in mix. How should we think about potential to rebuild margins? And I think from a top line, how are you thinking about sort of the audience trends more broadly?

And then my second question was just maybe, Kevin, for you, just to come back to the comment and the tone around your stance on the portfolio. It feels like there's a bit of a change in tone around realizing assets and asset optionality. Could you just talk a little bit more around what changed there? And any more color you can give as you do review assets that drive the platform effect and those that don't?

Let me take your second question, and I'll pass on your first one to Sharjeel. Well, look, we have clear, well-defined strategic initiative programs, right, which we set out at the start of the financial year. And these strategic initiatives are progressing well, and they are driving growth. Future Optic is one that is worth covering in terms of its demand by clients across U.S. and U.K. as well as our sort of like creating the habit functionality whereby people follow us, comes to our brands to consume our editorial expertise, right?

Now like Future Plus, Colab, these are showing green shoots and green shoots as time goes by. So those are driving growth, as I said, and we expect these to ramp up through the rest of this financial year and into FY '27. We should also remind ourselves that we have our sort of like Google-Zero brands like Kiplinger who's performing very well year-to-date on an organic basis as well as Ideal Homes and actually the Homes vertical, which is again performing year-on-year very well year-to-date top line. And also not to forget that SheerLuxe, the acquisition that we made in January, is outperforming our own plans, which, again, combined with the Kiplinger and the likes of the Homes vertical brands are all Google-Zero.

Now as Sharjeel mentioned and I also mentioned, we're expecting e-commerce and programmatic to continue to decline. But then it's worth remembering that we have is all small numbers as we progress into the months coming. So we should expect that overall, the sum of the 2 translate into growth into FY '27. I'm giving you more than you have asked. Sharjeel?

Yes. Lara, let me pick up your 3 and 1. So in terms of visibility, I think the best way to look at it is H2 2025, audiences were down minus 20%. H1 2025, again, minus 20%. There has been relative stability over the last, I would say, 8 weeks or so, but we're being cautious, volatile. You can see week-on-week how things are changing. There's another Google algorithm update going on right now. So we're being cautious, and I'm applying another minus 20% to audiences in the second half of the year instead of assuming a small decline. So we don't have visibility, and that is the reason for the deliberate caution. I hope we beat it, and we're being overcautious, but I think the right thing to do is be cautious.

Then your second question was on the midterm. Look, as Kevin has said, we have a clear strategy around moving away from getting audiences pushed to us, to having audiences pulled to us by our Google-Zero strategy. And we've got internal brands, and Kevin talked about our acquisition as well that proves that. They will be at a slightly lower margin, right? E-commerce is at a higher margin, 80%, 90% margin on that kind of incremental pie, where some of these will be at a very good margin, but not at that level. And then AI visibility and using that to drive audience less revenues as well. So look, too early to get into medium-term guidance, but we've given a range for this year. We'll build it back up. We'll have great initiatives that Kevin and the team are working on, and we'll look to build it back up going forward.

And then your last question was around audiences more broadly in the future. Well, the strategy isn't pinned on audiences coming back. The strategy is pivoted on pulling audiences either through membership, either through Colab, either through making sure our brands are very clear and that brands and trust become more important in an AI world.

The next question is from Weng Lum Khoo from Jefferies.

So 2, if I may, please. Firstly, could you perhaps speak to the impact of the strategic initiative that's specifically supposed to drive non-Google traffic to Colab's signal? Perhaps any update there since the September presentation will be helpful in terms of how that's driving direct traffic, how that's driving e-commerce revenue streams, et cetera, et cetera?

And then the second question, I think you partially answered it. So the building blocks to your change in guidance and assumptions. So you spoke to the volatility of audience, the Google algorithm change. Is there any other external factors or internal factors that are driving the change in guidance?

Thank you, Weng. I'll take the first one. Sharjeel, you'll take the second one. The impact of the SI, as in the strategic initiative, I'll just focus on Colab, if I may. And like Colab, similarly to Future Optic, we released that over the last, what, months and just a bit, right? We've expanded that on a number of our brands, namely the luxury and lifestyle brands, and they're performing very well.

What does performing very well mean, right? They're performing very well in terms of attracting a niche set of audience that are extremely valuable to us, one. Two, they are very, very, very engaged. Our engagement metrics is at a minimum 3x more in terms of what we actually see in terms of like people coming to other non-Colab types of content, digital content, right? And then three, there's a bridge with what is produced by those content creators, those influencers through the prism of the Colab products, bridging that with commercial, right? Commercial branded content package, commercial sales activities and with a clear view to drive yield and top line. So that is just to give you a bit of color on the impact on Colab.

With regards to -- I think you may have mentioned Future Plus, if I'm not mistaken, but I'll sort of like expand briefly on this. This is, again, an initiative that was born 6 months ago or so. So far, we've actually driven in excess of 180,000 free members which, again, drives return repeat visit, which drives a higher engagement, which offers us sort of like valuable first-party data that we can package downstream and sell through our commercial sales activities. And that is only launched on 3 brands, I believe, and we're rolling it out on other brands.

And I must touch on Future Optic, on its impact. What we're seeing is a strong client demand in terms of solar sale of Future Optic, but also package sale as part of branded content across our portfolio so far and pipeline is very, very strong. So I'll stop here, but hopefully, you get a bit of color in terms of the impact so far. Sharjeel?

Sure. Weng, I think your question was around what's changed in terms of the factors. Let me answer it for H2 and then looking forward as well. For H2, quite a lot of the revenues are going exactly as we planned in terms of the strategic initiatives and some of the other revenue lines across the group and a couple are actually a bit better. What's changed is the caution on audiences. So we're assuming similar declines, but it's the audiences and the revenue are at very high margin in those 2 areas, as you know, and as you highlighted in your note recently. So that is what the main change is into H2 and driving the margin down to 25% to 27%.

I mean looking forward, look, Kevin has told you about all the great initiatives and actually how the click-through rate or the engagement rate or the things are doing better. And some of them will do very, very well, but they will be at a lower margin. So hence, that margin question in terms of the medium term. We'll give guidance when we've got a better feel for it. But those are the main factors that are impacting us. It's the drop in margin rather than a major revenue change.

The next question is from Johnathan Barrett with Panmure.

I'm probably just down to 1 or 2 questions now. Perhaps you could give us some perspective on what all of the new products are actually doing in revenue terms now. We've got all these new products that are being launched, but it's very hard to contextualize what they're really doing at the revenue level. So perhaps you could try to turn that into some sort of number for us today.

And the second question is around Go.Co margin going forward. This PPC squeeze seems to be something which will remain a problem for some time. Should we start to think about a different structural margin for that business given that impact? And if you could give us your thoughts around that. So I think those are my 2 remaining questions.

Sharjeel, I shall leave both of those questions to you in terms of impact on top line and Go.Co margin.

Okay. On the strategic initiatives, I think the best way to look at it is in terms of this year, and then Future Optic is about -- we've got a good GBP 10 million pipeline for this year. On some of the others, they're very early, Johnathan. And I know you're keen to model it, and I'll go into more color in May, if that's all right. But Future Optic is the one that's doing very well. As Kevin said, we've had a good half year on it, and it's going to double and a decent pipeline from 0 to around GBP 10 million in terms of the outlook in the pipeline. So that's a good one. On the rest of them, Johnathan, I get it, and I understand why you want it. But can I say that for the half year, and I'll give you more color at the half year then.

In terms of Go.Co, look, we've managed the business really, really well over the years, and it's doing a very good margin. Now on the PPC, yes, it's not just a Go.Co thing. It's in the market, and we're getting more costs. But we're also doing things to counter the cost. And the way to look at it is Future is brilliant at search. And yes, search is harder in terms of where we end up on the page, which is further down the page rather than even if we rank 1, 2 and 3. But over the last 4, 5 months, again, we've improved Go.Co's rankings on search to make sure it's very visible.

We're also being more efficient on how we buy our PPC. Every other company will do the same as well, but we are very focused on making sure we buy PPC correctly going forward. And then we've launched renewal. And the key thing on renewal is very early days, very small base, but it will grow, and we'll get all our Go.Co customers onto it and other people's customers on to it as well. The plan there is to reduce the reliance on buying individuals again and again and making Google much more rich. So that is the longer-term play.

And then as you think about what else are we doing, well, we're using Future Optic on Go.Co and making sure our own product is very visible in ChatGPT. We're developing new product for ChatGPT, and Kevin will give an update about that in May. And we're also going to improve our AI process in renewal as well. I mean, look, that's a very long way of saying, yes, PPC costs are going up, but we're going to try to counter it, either by being more efficient, either by retaining people better and driving costs out of the business. Longer term, I still think it's a good EBITDA 40% margin business.

Our next question is from Andrew Renton with Cavendish Capital Markets Limited.

Just a final one for me. So given this is going to be impacting Google revenues as well, do you have any thoughts on how they're going to approach this decline going forward and sort of mitigate their business model? I mean, it feels a little bit like they obviously have sort of jumped with the AI overviews, but it's having a big impact on them as well. So I'd be interested to get your insight around any changes going forward from them.

Thank you. Sharjeel, I will take this. Look, Google's road map is public and what I see, you see and everyone sees, right? They don't sort of like diverge anything in terms of like core strategic moves in terms of revenue, how they make revenue and how they want to actually sort of complement existing revenue with others or shift from existing to net new. So at this point, we can all sort of like posit thesis and approaches what we all can see, but that's more or less what I can actually offer you, Andrew, at this stage.

So at this time, we will wrap up the Q&A session. So I'll hand the floor back to Kevin Li Ying for any closing comments.

So I just wanted to actually thank everyone once again for joining us on this call today, especially at such short notice. We really do appreciate it. Hopefully, what we've shared and conveyed to you is very clear. And I wish you all a very good day.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you all very much for joining. You may now disconnect.

Hello, everyone. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. I know it is a busy day, and we appreciate your time. For today's results, Sharjeel will take you through some market context and the FY '25 performance. I will come back to talk through our vision, strategy and my confidence in how the actions we are taking to build the business of tomorrow will deliver substantial value upside.

What we would like you to take away from this presentation is 3 things: one, a better understanding of the topic that is understandably front of mind for many, namely audience and AI. Sharjeel will cover why the risk is not as big as you think. And I will take you through why this is actually already a revenue opportunity. We want to be open or as open as possible in sharing what we are seeing and how we are positioned. Two, a clear view on what Future is today. A data-first scalable platform and the progress we are making on our strategic initiative to take full advantage of this, in particular, as we build out new revenue streams to drive the platform effect -- the network effect. Three, and finally, how we are continuing to evolve our business model to drive productivity and efficiency gains and continued strong cash generation.

Thank you. Sharjeel, over to you.

Thanks, Kevin. Good morning, everyone. Right. First thing, the score in the second test was 204 for 4 when I had to turn off my phone just now, right, Future financials. I'll get serious.

We are pleased to deliver financials in line with consensus. Revenue at GBP 739 million was down 6% year-on-year on a reported basis, with organic performance down 3% as previously communicated. Our adjusted operating profit of GBP 205 million reflects the expected full year margin of 28%. This margin is flat year-on-year and demonstrates our disciplined approach to costs. Combined with the benefit of our share buyback program, this has translated into an adjusted EPS decline of only 1%.

The group continued to generate good cash flows at 86% of AOP and 96% underlying. The balance sheet remains strong with leverage of 1.3x after having returned around GBP 100 million to shareholders in this period alone. And in line with our capital allocation policy, this morning, we have announced a 5-fold increase to our ordinary dividend and also our fifth share buyback program.

To summarize these results, despite the macro challenges, we are focusing on what we can control, executing against our strategy, showing pockets of growth, investing in our future while tightly managing our costs, focusing on cash and applying our capital allocation framework.

Before I get into the detailed results, I wanted to spend a bit of time on some market context with regard to our audiences and the impact of AI, given the heightened focus on these areas. Amid all the noise about AI and its impact on media, one question we're asked most often is what is happening to our audiences, how we are impacted and the extent to which we're impacted is not that well understood. Sharing that understanding is our responsibility. So let me take you through that today and share some insight about audiences today. Kevin will then pick up on our strategic initiatives, focused on our new audiences of tomorrow as well as AI as a revenue driver.

So the first point I wanted to highlight is the world-leading brands we have across many verticals, brands and their trust they bring to audiences are increasingly important in our view. Brands provide our business with scale, resilience and multiple routes to monetize content. And our brands live across many platforms. Let's dig a little bit deeper on those digital audiences in blue on the left-hand side of that donut. Here, you can see the 317 million monthly average sessions we get on our website. You can also see that millions, in fact, billions of views we get on social media, e-mails, podcasts, et cetera. The point I want to make is that our websites are not the sole driver of how our passionate audience interacts with us.

Next, let's go a little bit deeper on our specialist sessions, specifically on how our audiences come to us today. Firstly, at the macro level, it is worth noting that the use of Google Search has so far not seen a reduction. Conversational or AI-driven search is growing rapidly, but not at the expense of traditional search. The key point I wanted to share is that only 27% of the 317 million sessions are from Google Search, which is probably a lower percentage that many in this room and watching on the webcast thought it was.

It is worth noting that Google Discover, a personalized news feed, when you use the Chrome browser or use the Google app on your mobile, did not exist a few years ago. We find that Discover builds brand loyalty as an excellent source of repeat visitors, Future proactively adapted to that change, and we'll continue to innovate and remain agile, it is part of our DNA.

Next, let's talk about the impact of AI in that blue Google Search segment. We have seen AI overviews that appear on Google Search grew rapidly over the last 6 months. AI overviews now appear on about 50% of Future's key terms, words that we value and track. Yes, this growth in overviews has impacted our sessions performance being down 10% year-on-year at 317 million, but we have only seen a 4% reduction in total digital advertising across the year. The point I wanted to make is that the decline in sessions has not resulted in a straight drop-through to advertising. Why? Because while we have seen a reduction in programmatic ads, this has been offset by increased interest in branded content advertising. Brands matter and increasingly so. And this is even more clear to see in the second half of the year. Sessions were down minus 16% in H2, but total revenue from advertising was flat. Yes, total ad revenue was flat in H2.

As a result, our direct digital advertising revenues have increased to 68% of total advertising. And remember, these revenues come with a higher yield than programmatic. So what does this all mean for our business today? AI search trends do impact us, but only on those revenues that are more directly tied to sessions. We are a diverse business, and those revenue streams only account for 16% of our business. Further, Go.Compare and B2B are fairly immune due to the high barriers of entry.

If you look at the revenue breakdown on this slide, there are areas that are impacted by AI, and there are areas of good growth, which will offset areas of decline. And to that point, we are creating our own momentum to drive growth, which brings me nicely to the last slide in this section. We remain laser-focused on to the day-to-day execution of the business, but we are also focused on building tomorrow. Shaping our own trajectory, we are developing new revenue streams, which will enable us to deliver our ambition of sustainable revenue growth and cash generation. Direct audience relationships that we pull rather than audiences being pushed to us will increasingly drive future monetization. And this is exactly what Kevin will talk you through later. For now, let's get back to the FY '25 financials.

Overall, the group's organic revenue declined, as expected by 3% for the full year. In B2C, we were down 2%. As I mentioned at the half year results, Future started the year well and was an organic growth for the first few months of our financial year. And despite tariff uncertainty impacting our performance in March, we have seen a fuller recovery in U.S. ad budgets in H2. Go.Compare was down 5%, again, in line with our expectations given the record performance last year. It is worth noting that FY '25 is the second highest revenue year ever for Go.Compare. In B2B, the tech enterprise market remained very difficult. However, other verticals like financial services and retail have shown good growth. And our SmartBrief asset continues to perform well.

Right. Let's get to the detail by each division. Let's start on B2C digital advertising. It has been about puts and takes across halves and also across geographies. This year, we are showing more information to help give a better understanding of the business. Firstly, let's discuss the high level, which are the 2 boxes on the left-hand side. Audience sessions were down 10% during the year, and this resulted in lower programmatic revenues. However, there was stronger demand on the direct advertising side. The lower audience volume was, therefore, partially offset by higher yield at plus 6%, which translated into an overall 4% decline.

Now, let's do the story by geography, on the right-hand side of the slide. Back at the half year results, I spoke about the uncertainty caused by tariffs, and you can see this in the first half performance in U.S. direct digital ads. However, as we previously highlighted, the U.S. returned to growth in the second half. We had a number of good client wins across the U.S. in gaming technology as well as fashion and beauty. And overall, our direct business in the U.S. grew double digits in the second half of the year. In the U.K., you can now see the benefit of the sales reorganization coming through. Direct sales in the U.K. grew in the second half of the year. I am conscious that these percentages can sometimes be quite abstract. So let me share a little bit more.

This chart shows the success we've had in driving digital advertising direct to us, especially in the second half. Direct ads grew 8% in the second half of the year, resulting in H2 total revenue being flat year-on-year despite the decline in sessions. This gives us confidence that we can grow the business despite the headwinds of the programmatic part of the waterfall. The U.S. remains the largest market for us, and there is more potential here. Given our #1 position in technology and strong positions in other verticals, we can gain market share.

Turning to e-commerce affiliates. E-commerce was a game of 2 halves. We started the year positively with a strong peak trading season, which showed in the H1 performance at plus 10%. However, as we flagged at the half year, we saw a softer H2 as a result of a decline in unique page views. And in H2, we saw the decline at 22%, a combination of lower page visibility of our buying guides and lower consumer confidence. Basket size highlights this confidence point. It remained flat year-on-year with inflation offset by less high-value purchases.

This performance in products has been partially offset by continued growth in the vouchers business, which was up 12%, but at 19% of the overall e-com business, this did not offset the decline elsewhere. The second half of the year has been disappointing, but we have been actioning a number of initiatives to improve our e-com business, and Kevin will give more color on how Signal, our strategic initiative in this area, has performed so far.

Last but not least, magazines. Magazines have performed strongly at flat year-on-year against an overall market which is in secular decline. This is a combination of 2 factors. First, we have produced premium books for Rolex, further print runs for Submariner as well as revenue from the second book in the series, Datejust. Secondly, a number of our initiatives in this area are now starting to deliver, notably around subscriber acquisition and retention. The resilient performance of magazines demonstrates the strength and value of our premium and specialist brands.

At GBP 192 million, Go.Co represents 1/4 of the group's business. Revenue declined 5% in the period, which is a solid outcome given the 28% revenue growth we experienced in 2024, translating to a 10% growth on a 2-year CAGR basis. Car insurance revenue, as expected, was down in the period, reflecting declines in overall quote volumes as insurance premiums also came down. However, this was partially offset by improved conversions when users came to the site. Overall, we are now fourth in car market in terms of price comparison.

During the period, we managed the business for returns. We have not chased revenues, which are not going to make a profit. And as we have said previously, diversifying revenue is the key strategic initiative for Go.Compare. And other revenues across home, life, pet grew 3% in the year.

Turning to B2B on Slide 22. B2B represents around 7% of the group at GBP 54 million in revenue. B2B performance continues to be challenged by the enterprise tech market. However, other verticals within B2B delivered growth in the period, like financial services as well as retail. A further point to note is that while B2B declined across the year, H2 was an improvement on H1. So signs the business is turning around. Within B2B, our SmartBrief newsletter platform remains a key asset that consistently delivers strong e-mail advertising performance for our clients. And this is highlighted by SmartBrief growing 1% year-on-year despite a very difficult market.

Going forward and in response to market challenges, we are actively integrating the B2B group to unlock cross-brand opportunities, both revenue and costs. For example, we have launched a combined brand sale to our tech clients across SmartBrief, ActualTech and IT Pro, and this is paying early dividends with client wins. We are also increasingly embedding AI tools such as Ad Genie, which suggests new ad copies to clients to improve campaign performance.

Turning to Slide 24, which highlights our P&L. The group's gross margin of 73% was up 2 percentage points. The accretion reflects the change in our revenue mix with less revenue coming from Go.Compare, which is dilutive at the gross margin level, but accretive at the net margin. During the year, sales, marketing and editorial costs were flat, driven by lower sales commissions, less TV media spend as planned and a number of brand closures, which were offset by inflation on salaries and wages and our planned investment across the teams.

Other revenues -- sorry, other costs saw a 11% decrease, reflecting the benefit of R&D tax credits and no FY '25 bonus accrual. There was an increase in depreciation and amortization year-on-year as a result of CapEx investment in prior years. Overall, this meant the group's adjusted operating profit was GBP 205 million, and margin has remained stable at 28%, which is a good outcome given the revenue declines. And each of our divisions maintain their percentage margins year-on-year. And at 30% EBITDA, Future remains a strong margin business.

Right. On to cash. As I said when I joined, now a year ago, cash conversion is my favorite topic. Future continued its strong cash performance, but we had a couple of one-off items. We had a catch-up VAT payment following an agreement with HMRC regarding our partial exemption method. Secondly, last year's staff bonus was paid from this year's cash, always the case. But with no bonus this year, there is no accrual and a working capital swing. These items will not repeat next year, and we expect to be around 95% going forward.

Moving on to the balance sheet and net debt. After CapEx of GBP 16 million, the group generated GBP 177 million of adjusted free cash flow. And after tax, interest, exceptional and EBT purchases, Future had a net cash generation of around GBP 83 million. We applied our capital allocation framework thoughtfully to utilize this cash. We spent GBP 3 million to buy Renewal and Kwizly, and we have returned circa GBP 100 million to shareholders through dividend and share buybacks. And after those uses of cash, the group saw a modest increase in net debt to GBP 276 million, representing a leverage of 1.3x.

During the year, we refinanced our RCF and also issued our debut Sterling corporate bond. The group now has committed facilities in place until 2029, and we expect plenty of liquidity to execute our strategy. We have cash conversion also expected to remain strong going forward. This highlights the group's solid financial position, which is a good segue to capital allocation.

Given the return announcements this morning, let's spend a bit of time on the capital allocation. In the past, the weighting had focused on strategic acquisitions, whereas more recently, has turned to shareholder returns. While the policy remains the same, going forward, the Board intends to have a more balanced acquisition.

Allocation. With capital allocation that will invest in and drive organic growth, have plenty of room for bolt-ons to accelerate the strategy and give a higher and more consistent return through our annual dividend and also return excess cash to our shareholders. Our intention is to have all of these engines in active operation while maintaining a conservative approach to leverage. I want to give more color on bolt-ons and dividends. But before that, our CapEx will be slightly higher than before as a result of the strategic initiatives. However, at 3% of revenues, Future remains an asset-light business. The one allocation that remains great out is strategic M&A. It is not currently a priority.

Turning to Slide 30. As well as organic investment, we believe that bolt-ons are a great way to create value by accelerating the strategy. We are focused on bolt-ons that will drive our leadership position in a particular digital vertical, be that to luxury or technology. Key criteria include being platform agnostic, aimed at faster-growing segments of the ad market, driving diversification of our audiences, assets that pull audiences rather than assets that have audiences pushed to them.

We're also looking at bolt-ons that can bring in interesting products quicker than building it ourselves, like we did with Renewal, which Kevin will cover in a bit. Or lastly, where a bolt-on can give Future skill capability in a new area, like Kwizly did with gamification and data. And we have a good pipeline of bolt-ons. All bolt-ons will have a clear alignment to the strategy and will be reviewed against a strong set of financial criteria as well.

Our first 2 allocations are rightly focused on growth. This is our #1 priority. But at the same time, we believe it is important to consistently return capital to our shareholders. We are very confident in the long-term cash generation of our business. This morning, we have announced a fivefold increase to our ordinary dividend. The dividend will be progressive, and we expect to increase it in subsequent years. It will provide a more meaningful return without impacting our ability to fund the strategy.

At this level, there is plenty of cash to be pointed towards growth, organic or bolt-on. Also, this morning, we announced our fifth share buyback, this time for GBP 30 million. This will start in the next couple of days once the current buyback is completed. We have now announced GBP 230 million of share buybacks. And with this, we will have purchased more than 20% of our share capital by the end of the fourth buyback program. This highlights, if that we have excess cash, we will use it to create value.

Finally, turning to the outlook slides. We are confident in continuing to deliver on today and building on tomorrow. In terms of the FY '26 outlook, we expect modest revenue growth in line with current consensus. FY '26 will be H2 weighted as the strategic initiatives and the operating model changes will deliver in the second half of the year.

In terms of margin, we are confident of achieving 30% in EBITDA terms. And as ever, the group will continue to generate strong cash flows, improving to around 95%. In the medium term, we are confident in achieving our ambition of sustainable revenue growth and cash generation, again, in line with market consensus.

Right. At Slide 34, I am only a few boundaries away from a half century here, which is a really tempting milestone for [ Ebola ]. But don't worry, I will declare and hand over to Kevin, who will take you through the vision and the strategy.

Thank you, everyone.

Thank you, Sharjeel. Future is a data first platform that monetizes high audience engagement powered by technology and enabled by our trusted specialist brands with authority. We will leverage our data insights and intelligence to expand into numerous emerging adjacent data-hungry markets. Remember, we have over 175 brands, giving us scale that we monetize by leveraging our tech platform in a multitude of ways, making the platform a powerful vehicle or a powerful value creation vehicle.

Let me explain this platform concept in more detail. So you can understand the lenses through which we operate the group. All great platforms have 4 common characteristics. They are connectors. They are data first. They are scalable. They deliver the platform effect, a network effect. To date, we have -- we are having successes on each of these characteristics, but we have so much more to go for. Before covering what this means for Future, I would like to emphasize that for us. This goes hand-in-hand with our financial characteristics of being, one, asset light; two, having a high EBITDA margin; and three, being a strong cash generator. We ticked 3 out of those 4 boxes. The one which is missing is sustainable revenue growth. I want to come back and add revenue growth as the fourth bullet on this right-hand side.

Now, starting with connecting through brands. Sharjeel has covered the importance of our brands earlier. Let me emphasize this point. We are connecting audiences through the power of our brands that give us authority. Whilst we know that people also trust brands, people trust our brands. We have market-leading brands across valuable content verticals and geographies. We are #1 in tech in the U.S. and in the U.K. We are #1 in homes in the U.K. and #4 in the U.S. We are #2 in beauty in the U.K. and #4 in the U.S. This is our moat. This is a competitive advantage. When it comes to taking on market share commercially, the power of the brands is even more important going forward than it was before.

Next, data first. This is where, at the moment, we don't score a 10 out of 10 and where there is an exciting opportunity to do more. We have an immense amount of data. In fact, 1 trillion data points in our data lake each month, yes, trillion. We already have or we already use an extensive amount of data to better inform our content decision-making, for example, what to write, when and to assess the performance of ad campaigns. But data in abundance is less valuable than data with intelligence and insights. This value is disproportionate.

Our content, which helps people find what they want, also gives us data and insights that helps brand achieve their objectives, up and down the funnel. So this is not data for data's sake, but first-party deterministic data that drives value and help increase brand and ad campaign's performance. Now, for example, if you are buying travel insurance and you are in the market for student laptop that we can leverage, this is very rich first-party data that we can leverage on our brands and/or through partnerships with other brands. This aligns with the platform effect.

Third is scalability. This is about the scalability of our tech and other back-office function, meaning that back-office costs don't need to grow in line with revenue and that our centers of excellence can be leveraged across our brands and revenue streams. We are quite effective at this. But again, we can do more, and I will cover this in one of our strategic initiatives later on today.

Fourth, the platform effect. For those of you that have been following us for some time, you will be very familiar with it. It is about applying everything we do when relevant to our whole portfolio of 175 brands. It is about driving cross-pollination between products. It is about driving cross-pollination between brands. We do it once and deploy it across brands and audiences, which leads me nicely to our business model.

We have a strong track record of executing it with an EBITDA margin of 30%. The more we drive initiatives and revenue, the more powerful and valuable the platform becomes creating a flywheel. Let me first cover the theoretical business model before bringing it to light with examples. It all starts at the top of -- with brands and content to reach and pull in the audience in a diversified manner on the right-hand side.

Next, we apply a growing set of innovative products at the bottom to further drive engagement, brand stickiness and a clear value exchange with our customers and clients. Finally, we monetize through diverse routes from print to digital subscription, newsstand to -- down to e-mail and, of course, display and video advertising. And alongside each moment, we capture more data, which in turn, used to perfect our products and content and further drive revenue. What this means in practice for driving growth? Well, it is about existing and new audiences that we can monetize with existing and new products driving net new revenue streams.

Right. Let's have a look at how it works in practice today using Kiplinger. Kiplinger is a largely U.S.-focused personal and investment brand, largely a subscription brand. We have put Kiplinger through the platform effect in the last 12 months understanding our audience and the data, improving the monetization of existing and new audiences. The results are clear.

We have diversified the audiences with 16% digital audience growth coming from social, referral and e-mail. We have monetized these new and existing audiences more effectively, driving 10% overall organic digital revenue growth. This example is not unique. We are seeing similar outcomes on Cyclingnews, Cycling Weekly, homes and gardens, all showcasing diversified audiences with more effective monetization, all of this with our existing tech not adding the new strategic initiatives to propel it. We do it once, and we deploy it across.

Now, let's have a look at how Collab a strategic initiative and how it is making our flywheel spin faster. Collab is about creating a network of content creators that use our platform to publish and monetize their content using our tech stack. We can do this at scale through a revenue share model across brands.

Now, let me explain how it works using Editors in Residence. That's a Collab product on who, what, where. Content creators such as Karla Welch and Tiffany Reid publish their content on who, what, where to build their own personal brands with ours, and we benefit from their audience. They then use our suite of products to monetize their content effectively on their own. They don't have the tech and capabilities to do so effectively. So they monetize their content, and we get a revenue share. What this means is that this is a 100% variable cost model to us, leveraging existing and new capabilities, and along this journey, we collect data, audience data, e-commerce data, adding to our 1 trillion monthly data points generating valuable insights.

We increased our audience through the creators, making our brands more powerful. We attract in turn new creators that are looking to build their personal brands whilst making money. These are early days, but the green shoots are giving us confidence.

On Collab content, we get 3x the social traffic, diversifying further from Google SEO. We are also getting incremental e-commerce revenue on top of digital advertising. And the platform effect has yet to be deployed, as this is only on 7 brands. On this example, we are monetizing new audiences with existing products, but we are also monetizing new audiences with new products, and I hope this example has clearly and practically showcased the power of the flywheel.

And before turning to new initiatives, let me give you a quick update on the other 2 we presented in September. They are about revenue building across brands. They are about brand-agnostic initiatives. Starting with Signal, which, as a reminder, is our e-com 2.0 proposition to diversify our affiliate model and meet our users wherever they are, such as on social media. Signal has produced to date over 160 collections powered by our editor teams or Collab content creators, translating into over 900,000 page views, and we have doubled our social and e-mail traffic compared to traditional content.

Next, Future+. The embodiment of our Google Zero strategy, driving engagement directly on our -- with our audience through a range of products and tools. The green shoots here are very encouraging. Whilst we have only launched it on 3 brands in 3 months, it has driven 67,000 new members for whom the sessions are 4x longer, driving more revenue, and cream on top is adding insightful first-party data in our data lake. And picture that, we have delivered all this and more in less than 10 weeks, and we have yet to leverage the platform effect -- the network effect in full, as we have not yet deployed these initiatives across the group.

And now, let's turn to the new initiatives. At our investor webinar, at the end of September, we rolled out our 12-month roadmap with initiatives to deliver on our strategy. Today, I will cover 3 new ones. One, AI audience, which we are calling Future Optic. This is about how we are leveraging our expertise to create net new revenue streams. Two, rev renewal, the Go.Compare membership proposition that focus on increasing retention. Three, fostering efficiency in our business model.

Now, on to Future Optic. Most people view AI as a risk to us. Sharjeel has addressed why this is not as big as feared. What I'm about to cover now is the opportunity it represents. Authority inside AI surfaces is now a monetizable asset, not just a nice to have. We are already monetizing this authority. My use of the present tense is important because we're seeing it in our numbers. So it all starts with brands.

Because of the quality of our content, because of the history and the years of archive that comes with it, because of the brand's equity. Our brands are authoritative and influential, and they are even more influential on LLMs given the concentration of citation versus traditional search or SEO. We then leverage our tech platform, our data and our audience, specialist teams to understand how LLM was creating a playbook on AI visibility. Now, this playbook is not static. It is refined constantly.

This in turn inform our editor teams on what, when and how to produce content that is visible, ensuring we are best placed to answer valuable prompts. And in turn, the work of the editor teams is fed back and informs the work of the tech data and audience teams.

As we are building LLM's authority and can demonstrate our savoir faire, the sales team is able to leverage our brands combined with our editorial authority to sell branded content packages to advertisers in order to -- for them to be visible and drive in return their own brand equity. This LLM visibility is not made profound, and AI analytics company says that TechRadar is the third most cited source on ChatGPT. And looking at our own key terms, we are leaders in 8 out of 10 content verticals on AI overview.

Now, the problem we're trying to solve here is that there is a shift in audience. Our brands and our customers are looking for visibility in large language models. What we are doing here is that we need our content to be visible on LLM as it is a convent -- as it is in conventional search. The fact that we are leaders in SEO combined with the trust and authority of our brands give us a competitive advantage.

Just like we work to be the best at SEO, we work to be the best at LLMs. And we can transform this knowledge into bespoke advertising package for our clients, as I said. Simply put, this is driving -- it is about driving new revenue streams from new audiences as well as new direct revenue, one that does not require our audience.

This is happening and driving our revenue right now. On this slide, you can see an example of Future Optic in real terms through a large campaign we did for Samsung in the late summer this year. Samsung was looking to promote one of its products and wanted visibility in AI as well as on authoritative brands like Tom's Guide. We produce a bespoke package for them, which included a range of formats, helping to educate humans and bots with accurate up-to-date information and advice.

The outcome of this campaign was successful with an uplift in mentions between 23% to 33% and close -- giving us close to 5,000 LLM citation. Samsung is not the only client we sold Future Optic to. We have sold it to other tech and luxury clients, demonstrating our ability to build the playbooks and deploy it across brands and clients. And the pipeline is building, including renewable opportunities.

Now turning to price comparison initiative. Before we dive in, I wanted to recap on how we drive value and price comparison. Simply put, it's about improving the consumer funnel by, one, reducing the cost of acquisition; two, increasing the conversion, i.e. consumers across -- consumers request a quote actually convert into sales; and three, increasing the retention, not having to acquire back these consumers each and every time they come back to renew their insurance.

So how have we delivered since the acquisition in '21? To drive acquisition we have leverage, our SEO capabilities. We have a center of excellence in our B2C business, sharing best practices. We've leveraged our in-house ad space, meaning utilizing any unsold inventory on our B2C website. We've renamed it Go.Compare to drive direct landing onto the site rather than on search results.

And to drive conversion and retention, we have fully replatformed Go.Compare. This has enabled us to: one, consistently improve the log-in journey; two, push effectively new products to drive engagement. That integration of Go.Compare and being excellent operators of this business has translated in strong financial outcomes with 9 percentage point -- 9% CAGR revenue growth and 7 percentage point improvement on EBITDA margin. This is only the start.

We now have a true platform that we leverage to drive further upside, and let me show you our first price comparison strategic initiative, Renewal. Back in March 2025, we bought Renewal because it combined all your insurance details in a single place, no matter where you bought from and who your policy is with. No more searching through e-mails in a time of crisis. It helps users to manage their policies, including renewal dates, offers and advice moving Go.Compare from just being about buying a policy to being alongside our users all year around whenever they need us. All to say that it fast tracks our membership proposition with the aim to improve the consumer funnel I presented earlier by being the best place for consumers to manage and save costs on households-related products.

Now, it is worth sizing up the opportunity. Today, 25 million to 30 million -- yes, millions of adults in the U.K. use a price comparison website to buy insurance every year. This is the addressable market. This year, we spent GBP 75 million on pay-per-click or TV campaigns costs. This is a part we believe we can reduce without impacting revenue. We want to be more efficient and have better returns on marketing spend.

So what are we doing with Renewal? We will relaunch the app in Q1 to drive growth at Go.Compare beyond market growth. This will encourage Renewal and Go.Compare improving our marketing efficiencies, therefore, improving retention. It will drive cross-selling opportunities. It will enhance our rich first-party data lake that can be leveraged across the group, making our data and users more valuable to us. It will attract new customers through an engaging value-added app. This is the focus of renewal. And I'm hoping that I have convinced you to download Renewal and become part of the journey with us.

Now, to date, we have been good operators. We have made Go.Compare a better business. The financial outcomes are the proof points. However, what I want you to recognize is that we aren't just here to be good operators, we are here to leverage the platform we have created to drive further growth. And to do so, we will continue to leverage Go.Compare assets, supercharging this with Future group assets. And the outcome will be to fuel the Future's growth profile by improving acquisition, conversion and retention, driving the platform like for any of our brands.

Turning to the last strategic initiative I want to cover today, a more efficient operating model. Innovation is transforming the way we do things. We are leaning into this to drive productivity and efficiency gains. The group-wide program is about creating efficiency and sustainability on our value chain and business model. And we are doing this by rethinking and streamlining our processes and structure using AI tools to drive automation.

This initiative will drive GBP 20 million of efficiency savings by FY '28 maintaining our EBITDA margin at least 30%. This initiative is the perfect demonstration of our DNA through agility, innovation and focus on execution and delivery -- focus on execution and delivery. And I look forward to updating you on the progress we're making.

And, I know we have covered a lot of ground today, there is momentum. And if you were spending a day with us, you would feel and see it. I just wanted to leave you with 3 thoughts. One, AI risk is not as big as you think, and AI represents revenue opportunities that we are delivering today. Two, we're further leveraging the platform to drive initiatives across businesses. I have taken you through AI audience, price comparison and the operating model and how all these initiatives will drive the platform effect, the network effect as we deploy them across the Future ecosystem. And finally, we are continuing to evolve our business model to deliver efficiencies.

In summary, we are delivering on today at pace, whilst building for tomorrow to deliver sustainable, profitable revenue growth and cash. I just want to share my conviction and excitement with you. And I hope the following slide helps frame the opportunity. Our strategy supported by our initiatives is to drive that sustainable, profitable growth over the medium term of 2% to 4%. This is, as Sharjeel said, our #1 priority.

This is a significant change from the last 3 years, where revenue has declined by 4% on average. This isn't predicated on a material change in macro. We are good operators, and therefore, we are confident on having EBITDA margin of at least 30%. And we will continue to deliver cash conversion of at least 95%. I am keen that we are open and transparent, and we will continue to share our progress and new initiatives through a webinar before our half year results in May.

Thank you for listening. I will now open the floor to Q&A. I'll take a question from each, please.

First one from me. Gareth Davies from Deutsche Numis. Sorry, was that I'm restricted to 1 question or I can ask the 3 that I was going to ask? I'll ask for 3. I can't ask 3. Direct advertising, very strong performance in H2, a big step-up in both markets. Can you just talk a little bit about how lumpy some of the contracts are in there? How much visibility you've got into '26? Some of the self-help that kind of drove that beyond a slightly more positive macro backdrop?

I'll start, and I'll pass it on to Sharjeel. So in terms of the contract length, it varies by client, to be fair, right, from 3 to 12, by and large. In terms of the quantum, right, it is -- again, varies by client and propensity to spend depending on the campaign. In terms of the quality. It's like it matches with what the brands give. The brands, we have market-leading brands. Not only we pull -- we're working to pull the audience, but we're also actually working to actually pull in the advertisers, and they are coming. In terms of pipeline, it's a healthy pipeline. Yes.

The way I would look at it is, remember, all the things we're looking at in terms of visibility, the same thing is happening to our clients as well. This isn't just a Future or a media thing. This is happening to other brands around the world in other companies as well. So our authority is more important. And that's why when I said brands are more important and increasingly slow, that was what I was saying. In terms of how we're faring Q1, similar in terms of what we've seen in Q4, which is branded content doing well and direct sales growing as a percentage. So similar trends.

And then the second one, a similar one on Go.Co, obviously, the tough comps this year made it a little more difficult, but we're sort of starting to lap those now. From a car insurance perspective, what are you seeing and sort of confidence in pickup in other areas? Are we still expecting a bit of a lag there given home was sort of later to come in?

I'm not going to get into month 1, October; month 2, November. These things will ebb and flow, and Q1 has historically been the soft quarter for Go.Co anyway. As a step back, let's have a look at what we think the year will be for Go.Co. Car insurance premiums declined last year. Inflation is now still in the market, it's 3%. So that hopefully should start working in our favor going forward on car.

Others, it's still the diversification strategy. We've got some very exciting initiatives coming up, which I'm not going to talk about today, but some really interesting things that we're doing, and we've launched Renewal as well. When I stand back low to mid-single digits, Go.Co is what I'm looking for, for the full year. Whether that's from home, life, pet, van, car, we will see that. But our ambition is around mid-single digits to low-single digits.

And then final one, just a point of clarification, really. Kevin, you sort of said we're not 10 out of 10 on data. And did you mean in the context of we're not collecting the right data? Or did you mean we're not using the data in the way we should be and we're not taking advantage?

It is in both, right? And I think that we are dutifully, rigorously and working on this at pace. And I think there's more upside.

Sophia Yu, I'm from ABN AMRO. So one quick question on the strategy side. So could you elaborate a bit more on the whole Google Zero strategy, the horizon and how you see that bring impacts to business?

Yes. So thank you for your question. The Google Zero strategy, look, we have audience from Google Search and a diversified audience mix. Google Zero strategy is about focusing on non-Google Search channels for growth. And we obviously welcome the Google Search source of traffic, of course. And our focus is to focus on the quality of the brands, building that up, building the customer proposition and the value exchange between us and the clients, us and the customers and with a clear view of attracting them and pulling them in.

Yes. It's Nick Dempsey from Barclays. I've got 3, please.

If you go one at a time. Thank you.

Okay, sure. The first one, seeing the -- how big Google Discover is on your pie chart -- I mean, there were some issues in terms of the algorithm change there, which other people experienced this year, has that been a problem for you guys? And is it a risk that you're so exposed to that, that they can make any change whenever they want, they could get rid of Discover if they wanted?

Thank you for the question. The -- Nick, the critical thing to understand is our audience is diversified, right? And our focus is to focus on diversifying it further, right? And with regards to the Google Discover, it demonstrates that it's a personalization fee that Sharjeel said. It demonstrates the value and strength of our brand, how our content connects with the people, our consumers. And it works. With regard to the algorithm that you mentioned, we have dedicated focus, resource, talent, expertise, and that is key to us. The landscape changes, we react as much as we plan ahead. And at all times, we're here literally inches away in order to actually combat that and thrive and build off that.

Yes. The second question was, to what extent do your new initiatives need to come through as you hope through the year in order to hit the revenue guidance you've given us for the full year?

We'll answer it in 2 parts, right? I'll take the strategic roadmap. The key for us is, is to have an approach whereby we can go at pace on many fronts. Now is the time because we're seizing the opportunity and creating our own momentum at pace. For us, we've shared with you the green shoot. And it's a constant iteration, and as for those that works, we'll double down on it. And for those that doesn't, we'll stop it. And we'll -- we have -- like Sharjeel just said a moment ago, we have a raft of initiatives that we're planning in the background. So that is a healthy operating model and how we're approaching it.

Now, in terms of the numbers...

Yes. I will take it. So the key thing to say on the strategic initiatives for me, it's not unproven items. Future Optic, we're selling in the market today. It is happening right now. But there's also a bunch of BAU initiatives that we haven't spoken about here, but we're doing them. Anyway, that's what we do, we run the business today and build tomorrow. So I wouldn't say it's reliant on that, but there is a waiting piece that I'd like to bring out. So revenues are probably going to be around 45% H1, 55% H2 because some of the operating model will come in later on. The profitability will probably be 40% H1 and then around 60% H2. But it's not that the strategic initiatives have to all fire, all work for us to hit those numbers. There's some benefit baked in, but there's other stuff, which we haven't talked about as well.

Okay. And the third one, a bit geeky. The change in working capital was, I think, the biggest outflow that we've seen ever. So can you talk us through what drove that? And given you've got 95% cash conversion expected this year, can we expect definitely a smaller outflow in change in working capital?

Yes, you can. Right. I love this. So the 2 -- we pulled out 2 key drivers on working capital, and I'll give you 2 or 3 others, which weren't working capital as well related. So underlying 95%. Why is that? Future doesn't have stock, right? It doesn't build assets. I mean, I asked the other day, what our stock was? It's about GBP 1 million on the balance sheet. It turns out it's paper. So we don't have stock. The key thing is those are 2 one-off items. If we hit our numbers, we'll pay a bonus year. So that won't happen this year.

The key one, it was about GBP 16 million one-off payment to HMRC. It's a partial exemption piece. We can talk one-on-one, and I can explain to you exactly what that is. That's not going to happen again. We've settled with HMRC. It's a working capital piece because we had already provided for it last year. So that's why there's no P&L effect. It's purely a cash and a working capital piece, the accruals coming down that we had provided for. Those are the 2 big swings.

There's deferred income, which tends to go down every year a little bit because subscriptions are sort of down every year. So again, I can spend a bit more time talking to you about that. But even if I take just those 2 out, the GBP 16 million and the GBP 4 million, that GBP 20 million gets you from GBP 86 million back to GBP 96 million. So I'm very confident on that.

But there were a couple of other cash items, which impacted leverage, but in a good way. We gave back GBP 100 million of share buybacks this year. That fourth one went a lot faster. I mean, it's about to finish in the next couple of days. So we bought back shares quicker than we had done previously. That impacted it.

David is sitting right in front of you. David did a really good job on the RCF and on the corporate bond. But we had bank arrangement fees. So that was a bit there as well. And when I take all of those out, the working capital and the one-offs, I'm very confident in our cash generation going forward.

It's Johnathan Barrett from Panmure. I do have 3, but I'll go one at a time, if that's okay. Not too much more to ask really after the others. Just one very broad question. Now that you've kind of been running the business for a while, and you've seen how the world is evolving and you've got your plans, is 175 brands the right number? So that's the first question.

There's no good answer for that. It's like we -- all of our brands, right, is additive, right? And the way how we actually -- we invest on those that has the most promise, potential for growth and where brands tend to actually underperform whereby it's telling us that there is no consumer demand for it, there's no client demand for it, we are fiscally responsible. We don't run brands to be unprofitable, and we review them. We have the work stream that is always on, and we actually review our brand performance over time and like we've done so in the past.

And then the second question, your growth guidance, again, 2% to 4%. Just thinking about everything you said today, how does the 2% to 4% work out? Which bits of the business are going to do what, roughly so that we can understand your assumptions on that, please?

Okay. So stepping back, around 1% next year is what the consensus is at the moment for FY '26. FY '27, possibly around 2%, 2.5%. The bit that Kevin talked about is his and mine and the Board's ambition going forward. That's why we've got the 2% to 4% going forward, probably from 2028. But that's the base, right? That's what we believe. How does it pan out? Well, very similar to what you've seen, direct ads are becoming more and more important, right? 68% of our total ads is from brands. We see that growing. That will drive mid-single digits from advertising perspective.

At the same time, you've got to remember, we've got a very large magazines business, print, news trade as well as subscription. That is declining. We're declining a lot less. And I know we were flat this year. And that will always be our ambition as we turn it around, but that will probably decline low single digits going forward as well. So you've got a bit of growth there and you've got that.

You've got e-commerce, but then you've got Signal coming in. When I overall look at it, B2B -- sorry, B2C, flattish this year and a little bit more growth and a little bit more growth going afterwards. And then in B2B and Go.Compare, look, we're great owners and we've got some fantastic plans for both of those businesses. But again, those are profit -- growth, yes. And I see mid-single digits for those 2 in terms of the long run. And when you do the math and the weighting across the piece, I think you kind of get to the 2% to 4% going forward.

And then just thinking about the various AI platforms that are out there scrapping it out at the moment, any thoughts on who's looking like they know what they're doing? Who's going to be in your space? Who you really need to pay attention to? You mentioned a few names today in the deck. Just anything you want to say about that? Or do you want to start that one?

We'll be -- one thing for us all to remember, we are platform agnostic. We will be where the consumers and the clients are, and we will actually deliver the value exchange for both at pace.

And look, we adapt, so...

The agility.

The agility. Right. So to the earlier question from Nick, we will adapt depending on what the world we face.

Andy Renton from Cavendish. Just got a question around Google Discover. So is that part of the Google Zero strategy as well? Or is it just Search? And has that source been impacted differently to Search? And then, is there sort of a difference in terms of the audience that is delivered from each of those, just given that it's obviously a larger portion of your audience?

Right. Can you repeat, please?

Repeat?

Yes.

Okay. So is Google Discover part of the Google Zero strategy? Is that source also impacted differently to Search? And then, is the value of the audience that is delivered from Discover different to Search?

In terms of, is it part of the Google Zero strategy, well, look, we're looking at it from the lens of e-mail, direct, right, and social platform to us or within social platforms and the likes. Two is like -- so that's what I mean by Google Zero strategy. Is it yielding differently? Right. It depends on the content that is serviced through those channels. And if it is depending on the category as well and depending on the type and depending on the volume. So the answer is that there is many variables that affects yield in this channel versus the other channel, right?

And I think your middle one, sort of a question was?

Is that source being impacted differently by chatbots to the Search?

No, they're just different. It's like consumer pattern as in personalization, what is in there in terms of like it's like the more you consume the more you actually sort of like -- it surfaces more in the same type over time. So 2 different types of use case, and therefore, 2 different types of economics.

Any further -- I'm getting the kind of do it from the back there, but anyone for anything else? No? We wrap up.

Thank you. Thank you ever so much. And I hope you have a good day.

Thank you very much, everyone. Thanks. Bye.

Welcome to Future's investor webinar powered by our very own future B2B team. So not only do you get insight into the group's new products through this webinar, you get a live demo of some of what B2B does.

I'm Kevin Li Yeng, CEO of Future. And whilst I've been at Future for over 20 years, I've only been CEO for the last 6 months, and I'm delighted to be here today joined by my talented colleagues to give you more insight into, one, how we are driving the business forward, creating our own momentum and not only having the right to play, but also the right to win; and two, most importantly, why we are excited about our future. No one knows what the media landscape will look like in 5 or 10 years' time. But what we know is that brands trust and establishing a connection through building communities are getting increasingly important. And you will see that the new products that we will showcase today leverage these trends. We are delivering on today, whilst building for tomorrow.

For those who are unfamiliar with future, here is a brief overview. We are a global specialist media group reaching diversified and intent-led audience of over 475 million. We operate circa 200 brands with a portfolio led by super brands with some featuring on the right-hand side of this slide, in diversified verticals from technology and gaming down to news and wealth stopping by style and luxury. And our brands are platform agnostic, meaning that our global high-intent audience finds our content through our websites, e-mails videos, social platforms, magazines, live events and webinars. We have market-leading positions in many verticals, and we are proud of that. And we expertly monetize our audience through advertising, e-commerce affiliate and e-commerce services with GoCompare and magazines.

I will be joined today by some talented colleagues who will lift the hood on a selection of initiatives currently underway. I will let them introduce themselves, but I'm delighted to have Rob Hillary and Dave joining me today. And of course, we have Sharjeel, our CFO. But before I hand it over to them, it is important to understand our strategy and how it fits into the media landscape, which is changing faster than ever because this will set the context and rationale for our strategic initiatives.

What we will cover today is, one, we understand the changes in the landscape within which we operate; two, we are proactively creating our own opportunities to thrive. Three, as always, we're leveraging our track record by being agile and focusing on execution. Our strategy is simple, meaning it is understood by the whole organization, fostering alignment, and it is timeless, driving continuous focus on execution.

Starting with objectives. First, it is about audience. They are at the center of our purpose. It is about having diverse, growing valuable audiences with high intent. It is about being where our audiences are. It is about being platform agnostic. Second, it is about monetizing these audiences more effectively by diversifying our sources of revenue adding to our portfolio of products and upgrading our revenue profile through an enhanced customer proposition.

And third, portfolio. This is about having the right set of assets to fuel the first 2 pillars by selling and/or closing assets when they don't grow or contribute to cash or when they are worth more to someone else than the value we can create or buying businesses that would diversify our audience reach and engagement or add monetization routes through new products. At the very heart of our business model, we feature our enablers.

We first ise the power of our global brands and produce excellent content for our audiences. We have the firm and anchored belief that our editorial excellence and our content are core differentiators to our customers, and that is our moat. Our audience, including search and AI engine loves our content. We then use our scalable and high-performing tech platform alongside our rich first-party data to maintain enhance and add new products to drive incremental revenue.

And all of this is powered by our DNA, the future DNA of growth mindset, innovation and agility and rigorous execution. We believe it is vital to have the belief that you can grow and drive this belief by bringing innovative processes and products to lean into areas of growth. But to be successful, agility and rigor are essential you need to be ruthlessly pragmatic about it. After this brief reminder, I would like to spend a little time on how the world of search is changing, a clear link to our first strategic pillar, audience.

It is essential to understand the landscape in which we operate. The way people search for content is changing, and we're embracing this. SEO was the landscape. Now it's part of the landscape. Consumer behavior is slowly shifting away from traditional SEO to sponsored links on search engines to short summaries to AI-powered search engines and to prioritizing social first. Importantly, some of these changes are not new and have been happening for years. This is translating into an abundance of touch points, and it's very difficult to decipher what is right for the consumer.

The speed of change is faster than ever and can be confusing. There is a lack of trust around content as well, making brands more important than ever. What this means for us is that we are focused on: one, optimizing today's business by doing the business as usual, faster, leaner, and that we can continue to deliver world-class traditional search engine optimization, but at lower effort.

Two, we are embracing the changes to create new revenue streams as the team will evidence in just a moment. Just like 15 to 20 years ago, we introduced websites to complement our magazines. We will do it again by pivoting from SEO to AI and social, and this is already happening. But not everything is changing.

On to audience. Audience needs are immutable. There will always be a need for content and advice that can be trusted, powered by humans. Our audiences are looking for communities and to engage with our content and brands. Now this is timeless. What is important is to provide this trusted content to audiences wherever they might be. We believe that not only do we have the right to play, but more importantly, we have a right to win in this landscape. And this is why we have expert content delivered through powerful global brands with strong heritage and all of this is enabled by efficient scalable tech and valuable first-party data.

Additional reason to believe is that we have a successful track record of creating our own moments when the landscape is changing. And you might have noticed that these key success factors match perfectly with our enablers mentioned on our strategy slide. It is all about building direct audience engagement and being platform agnostic. So what does it all mean? The change in the landscape is a strong guide for our strategic initiative, embracing areas of growth and opportunities.

And the reason why we can do this with pace and agility is because our tech stack and our powerful brands. Today, the team will showcase our first 3 new initiatives. We are developing a compelling new source of direct audience to our brands. Hillary will showcase Collab and its synergistic model where we offer world-class tech stack and brands for content creators in exchange of revenue and audience.

Second, we decipher the e-commerce customer journey, making it easier for audiences. Rob will take us through signal. We are scaling our communities through engagement tools when Dave will demonstrate Futures+, our membership proposition. Now this is the start. We have other initiatives.

As you will see, we are building the business of tomorrow with pace and agility. So why are we doing what we're doing? It's simple and something you might have heard if you have been following us for a while, the platform effect. The platform effect is about value creation, where 1 plus 1 equals 3 or 4. The platform effect is all about driving audiences and using our tech stack to monetize it effectively through new products, creating scale and operating leverage. The platform is about doing more with less, iterating at pace, being first to market and milking this advantage and driving a strong culture with agility. The platform effect exists and has been existing for years.

But what we are doing today is adding to it, making the wheel spin faster. This is at the heart of the business model and key to delivering on today whilst building for tomorrow. I hope this introduction has provided you with useful context. And now I will hand over to Hillary. Hillary.

Thanks, Kev. Hi, everyone. I'm Hillary Kerr, the Co-founder of WhoWhatWear and the SVP of Women's luxury homes, Music, Photography and Design. I am quite excited to speak about one of our new initiatives, Collab. Collab is about creating a synergistic ecosystem with content creators, giving them access to our brands and our amazing tech for monetization in an exchange of content, audience and revenue.

So I can hear you thinking, why Collab? What is the problem that we're solving for our audiences, our business and for creators? Well, first and foremost, people trust people. The media landscape is changing and our audiences continue to shift their attention to creators. The global creator economy is huge, estimated to be worth approximately $250 billion, yes, with a B, dollars today, predicting it could be nearly double that by 2027. We are moving to capture that value instead of competing with it. That said, while everyone with an iPhone and a dream, thinks they can be the next Mr. Beast or Alex Earl, the reality is much more complex. Like any talent-based entertainment industry, be that football or Hollywood, only a fraction of creators actually make it to the top.

In today's landscape, standing out and having impact is tough. The market is crowded and competitive and making money as a creator is fragmented and complex. So what are we doing? Well, we all have something that creators want. We have trusted brands with reach that are valued by creators as a tool to raise their profile, credibility and reach. We also have a strong tech stack with diverse monetization routes, and we have an existing influencer network powering branded content businesses. We also have amazing editorial talent who knows how to spot talent themselves. That's literally their jobs.

They know exactly how to curate and how to bring the world's most interesting and impactful creators into the future verse, if you will. Our plan is to help our audiences engage more deeply in their passions by featuring selected creators on our brands, including our websites, social media, newsletters and podcasts. We'll combine the power of our brands with audience appetite for authentic human creator voices, maximize our combined scale and reach.

And finally, we'll support these creators through access to the power of our platform. Through collab, we will provide creators with the tools to publish multimedia content through our CMS, supported by our full monetization capabilities on a rev share basis. Our ad stack our e-commerce engine and our digital subscription capabilities. This delivers against a number of outcomes, trusted, vetted creators will allow us to reach new audiences and new demographics without Google. We'll deepen engagement, growing the breadth and depth of our content and doing it this way through a rev share allows us to make content scalable in a cost-effective way.

We also have an always-on pipeline of content, newness and talent that allows our brands to test learn and evolve more effectively and efficiently than ever. So I can hear you wonder how are we going to do this? Well, our Collab program is already live in beta across a number of verticals, and I'd love to show you what it looks like for our audience.

First up, on Marie Claire, we are using fashion influencers to expand the depth of our fashion, personal style and shopping content. While on WhoWhatWear, we are exploring new areas, including menswear, parenting, travel, culture and more. On Homes & Gardens and Ideal Home, we're going to provide even more thoughtful shopping and inspiration for our audience by featuring designs from a wide range of vetted interior designers. On Kiplinger, we are featuring qualified financial advisers to help support our audience, while on PC Gamer and GamesRadar, we are drawing directly from the community to cover more of the vast array, very vast of gaming options out there.

What's next? From here, we'll build on success and scale through making existing platform capabilities available to these vetted influencers. So what's in it for us? Hopefully, you can start to see how connecting our brands with brilliant content creators delivers on our KPIs. We'll be able to access new audiences and new demographics by working with up-and-coming creators independently of Google.

We'll be able to cover more than we ever could as we see in how we've already grown Marie Claire's fashion coverage and broadened our coverage of games beyond the obvious AAA titles. We'll also make content scalable delivering this through rev share means this can be infinitely scalable at our 100% variable cost. And with that, thank you. I will now turn it over to Rob to talk you through signal.

Thanks, Hilary. Hi, everyone. I'm Rob George, SVP of Product and e-commerce. I joined Future almost 3 years ago. And before that, I spent more than 15 years in and around the retail sector, so I'm excited to be talking about my home turf online shopping.

Quite simply, online shopping is broken for consumers and it's only getting worse. Almost 80% of consumers find online shopping overwhelming, and that's not a surprise. You're bombarded by excessive choice, endless sponsored links, fake reviews and AI hallucinations. And with Google sending less high-intent search traffic to publishers, we're taking a clear position will help consumers find the signal through the noise of online shopping. So that's why we're developing our new e-commerce platform called Signal.

Signal builds on the success of Hawk, our current e-com tech where Hawk already tracks and surfaces over 0.5 billion products from thousands of retailers to help customers buy with confidence. And in doing so, we generate more than $1 billion of revenue for retail each year. With signal, we're enhancing our existing platform to become the destination for high-trust shopping. We'll surface the advice of trusted experts create the best products for customers and do it in a way that makes shopping fun and games.

Of course, we'll also create value for the business. We already do a great job of monetizing the 60 million monthly e-com page views that we get and signal will help us monetize more of our audience. More of our 300 million monthly sessions, more of our 13 million e-mail addresses and more of our 2 billion monthly social impressions.

On top of this, we'll build loyalty, a more frequent, more valuable direct audience that helps build our first-party data asset. But I want to try and tell you what Signal is, let's take a look for ourselves. This is our first MVP of a curated collection launched earlier this month on WhoWhatWear. It's live now will be up to 15 by the end of this week across our brands and another 50 are in development to follow in the next month.

It's early days, but we're already seeing a 9% higher mobile click-through rate than the previous version. Collections combine trust, curation and shopability. They are always built by humans, leveraging their expertise, personality and hands-on experience with the products, so you can trust them. We then surface this as a heavily curated recommendation, cutting through the noise and reducing overwhelm with an expert edit of what to buy.

We'll then build on our existing Hawk capability to match the customer with the retailer. And as I mentioned before, you can see here how we're already seamlessly finding our audiences where they are in this example, integrating signal into a social story on Instagram.

Next, I wanted to show you the platform effects that Kev mentioned earlier in action. We're building Signal as a platform capability but we'll also tailor it to our brands and their specific audiences. You can see here along with the synergies that we're building across the initiatives we're talking today. This is a soon-to-be live example of how we're making our Collab creator connect content in the Homes vertical shoppable with Signal.

This provides us with another way of co-monetizing creator content on whatever channel that content lives. Also, if you look closely at the demo, you can start to see some of the sticky features that are central to Signal for logged-in users, being able to like products and build wish lists, encourages repeat visits, repeat engagements and social sharing.

Finally, it wouldn't be e-com if I didn't talk about Black Friday and our tech vertical. This is our core deals hub on Tom's Guide from last Black Friday. It's a really strong page for us commercially, but we think we can do more to help shoppers. So here's how signal collections will evolve over the next couple of months.

We'll do what we always do, curate and showcase the best deals out there that will help consumers find what they really want. We'll help them browse the best offers in a more visual way, help them sort and filter by their specific need and we'll build trust by highlighting our editorial expertise and why we think these deals are the best to buy.

Again, we'll surface this wherever our audiences engage with the content. With this, we'll help consumers find the signal through the noise at the most overwhelming time of year for shoppers. So this is just the start. Hopefully, you see the vision because before you know it, signal will be creating bespoke holiday gift guides, helping me build a gaming PC with my son and filling my golf bag with the clubs that will make me a less terrible golfer, then as we add more rich, engaging shopping features, wish lists, price alerts, exclusive rewards will have a truly exciting expert-backed shopping ecosystem.

So in summary, Signal is going to attract more users, making shoppers out of our entire audience wherever they consume content, engage them, driving frequency of visit and depth of engagement and finally create value by capturing and growing intent building customer loyalty and our first-party data asset.

Now on to our last product for today and one I think could be even more exciting than Signal, if that's possible. I'd like to hand you over to Dave to talk through Future.

Thanks, Rob. Hello, everyone. I'm Dave, and I'm the MD of our Knowledge and Sports Group, an exec sponsor of our free membership proposition internally known as Future+, which is what I'm going to talk through now. The problem we're trying to solve is that our audiences want relevance, trust, personalization and value from the media they engage with at a time when AI is making the creation of high-volume, low-effort content easier than ever. In a world of AI-generated answers and Google Zero we need to develop direct relationships with known users to build a community that drives direct frequent and valuable engagement with our brands. So what we do? We're creating a free membership proposition for our audience where personalized experiences, exclusivity and engaging features, build habit and generate a powerful value of exchange that benefits all.

As with the other initiatives you've seen today, this isn't from a standing start. We already have millions of members, people signed up through e-mail lists, forums, commenting and paid subscriptions. We have the core capability ready to assemble into a coherent membership proposition. So kiosk, which powers account and red wall functionality, Quizly, our engagement platform, which is already rolled out across key brands, commenting and forums, and rewards capability syndicated from the MyVoucherCodes business across our proprietary Eagle platform.

Our membership strategy is to assemble these engagement tools into coherent user-facing propositions at a brand level that support the individual positioning of these brands. We believe this can be game changing for our business because we'll reach more users growing our direct known audience by using our membership offerings as a social referral hook.

We'll drive frequency with engaging features, data-driven personalization and activation of our permissioned known audience, and we'll grow the value of this audience, leveraging the power of our first-party data and using it to build recurring revenues across our subscriptions business. So let's bring that membership vision to life.

As I mentioned, we believe membership will be truly transformational when we assemble our engagement tools, rewards and content offerings into coherent customer-facing membership propositions. This is leading consumer advice brand, Tom's Guide, where membership will be a buying advice and shopping-focused execution, combining exclusive member rewards, member competitions for money can't buy experiences, like an exclusive face-to-face with the Editor and Chief of the Consumer Electronics Show, for instance, and shopping features, such as price alerts and wish lists, really bringing to life the benefits signal can bring to the membership proposition.

In this video, you can see the rewards proposition coming to life. Starting with our e-commerce-enabled content and building on capabilities that started with my voucher codes. We can offer exclusive rewards like a GBP 10 Amazon voucher, for instance, that can only be redeemed by members. Once a user signs up via our kiosk platform, we can use Signal to show our audience a range of rewards.

And then our members can spend those vouchers on products we recommend through collections all within the customer account area, closing the loop on our ecosystem. The second execution is community and gamification focused perfect for a sports brand like 442. We already have high levels of engagement from football quizzes and building on that, we're adding poles, puzzles, exclusive content and tailored product offerings such as the score predictor and fun salary calculator to build out the membership proposition.

These tools deliver the initial engagement, and we will then further gamify membership through the introduction of badges and leaderboards. 442 and many of our brands at future also have physical magazines and paid digital versions and one of the core tenets of our membership program is that this will provide a valuable CRM funnel to acquire subscribers to these paid products. We aim to launch these 2 membership propositions alongside another one on our leading science new site live science by the Midland next month and have enough data from these live experiments to refine and scale by the end of the quarter.

While at core elements of these membership propositions is engagement platform Quizly, which was acquired in May. Since then, we've integrated Quizly across our platforms and applied it to 42 of our biggest brands. We've created almost 700 quizzes, games, puzzles and polls since going live in July, generating almost 400,000 plays. Average session duration is more than double the non-Quizly session and page reviews per session are 50% higher.

On top of this, we're generating revenue from including Quizzle in our offer for branded content campaigns, delivering valuable customer data and insight for our clients. The capability that Quizly is already unlocking for us is really driving that value exchange between publisher and user. Wealth calculators we've recently deployed on finance brand Kiplinger, speak to that point. These are engaging and useful tools for our users, but deliver highly valuable income data for advertisers.

There's much more to come here, and we've been able to do that at pace by protecting Quizly start-up agility and rapidly integrating the tech into our platforms. So Quizly, in and of itself is being delivered at speed but its real value comes when you start to see it as part of the wider membership proposition. So what's in it for us? The membership project is a big one for future as it overlaps with many areas of the business and has the potential to really supercharge what we do. It will help us build deeper and more mutually beneficial relationships with our audiences, providing a hook to drive social referrals and encouraging more repeat visits and engaged sessions and ultimately, building a valuable direct audience channel.

Membership will also power our CRM capabilities at scale using our known user base as the top of a valuable customer acquisition funnel to deliver more recurring revenues and will exponentially grow the power of our first-party data asset supporting our commercial business and enabling greater personalization for users. Thank you. I'll now hand back to Kev to sum up.

Thank you, Hillary, Rob and Dave. This is exciting. I hope that you share the same sentiment for those of you watching. In my earlier slides, I presented the platform effect and how we are aiming for more users, more often, more engaged, more valuable and more efficient. And the team has presented how each initiative does that. But the beauty of it all is that they don't work in silos. They create a synergistic ecosystem where each product fuels the others.

Collab attracts new audiences to which we can serve signal and Future+. Signal users can also be served Futures Plus and read Collab content. And of course, Future members can use signal to decipher, e-com and enjoy Collab content. Each initiative complements each other, adding scale, data, revenue and operating leverage, creating the platform effect.

Today, we only presented 3 new products. Our road map currently has 13. You can see the first 13 initiatives to drive performance against the key outcomes of more users, more often, who are more engaged and more valuable whilst we also ensure we are more efficient. These initiatives are on top of managing the core business, building for tomorrow, and I say first 13 with deliberately.

These are the actions we are making right now. Some of them won't be as effective as we'd like. Others will outperform, We'll stop the ones that don't work and embed those that do into BAU, replacing them with the next initiatives to move the dial on the outcomes. This is the pace and agility we need in the rapidly changing landscape. In order to maximize our success, we are laser-focused on rigorous execution and governance.

Each initiative is led consistently with one executive sponsor responsible for its success and a regular cadence of meetings to track progress and pivot as needed. This consistency matters because it drives scalability and our platform effect. And I want you to take away 2 things from today. First, we have the right to win because we have scale with our circa 200 brands reaching 475 monthly average users, including 2 billion monthly social impressions.

We have the financial strength through our combination of strong balance sheet and our efficient asset-light model. And we have a brilliant tech stack, and the expertise and the track record to deliver new products. And second, the momentum we are creating through these initiatives is not only complementary, they fuel our platform effect, driving scale and operating leverage and most importantly, revenue growth, and this is Thomas. And now we will open the floor to Q&A. [Operator Instructions] You can type your questions in the box on the right-hand side. Thank you.

Good afternoon. I'm Marion Le Bot III of IR at Future, and I will be facilitating the Q&A this afternoon. So I think our first question is for Sharjeel. And the impact of these initiatives on growth and whether that's already underpinned in the guidance.

Thank you, Marion. Hopefully, everyone can hear me. So in terms of finances, how do I see it? Well, these first 13 initiatives will drive our sustainable organic revenue growth in line with market expectations for FY '26 and beyond. And if one of these 13 -- and remember, there's more to come as well drive upside or are better than we thought. It will drive upside to those market expectations.

So we hope all of them are successful. But as Kevin said, some of them will work. Some of them won't, some of them will work very well. And if they do work well, then it will drive that organic growth. And remember the platform effect that the team talked about, that's also a key part. But also think about the market we're trying to address and why the team has spoken about the initiatives.

The landscape is changing. Kevin spoke about that. But what's also clear is that there's really good growth in our addressable markets as well. And it is on us to use these great assets that we have and the initiatives that the team have spoken about today to dive into these close adjacencies.

So hopefully, that gives you a bit of color. And then on the cost side, how does it play out on the cost side? Well, on the margins, these will remain circa around 28%. We will use efficiencies from AI optimization. You will have seen that in one of the charts that Kev had and the operating model work to offset any inflation and any other costs. Kevin and I have spoken about doing more with less, and we will continue to manage and allocate our BAU resources to drive the best returns. So hopefully, that gives you color on revenue and how I see it and also on margins, which we think will stay stable, and we will drive efficiencies.

The last point on CapEx. Look, we're an asset-light business model, and this feature will continue, and that was highlighted on the slide as well. That said, CapEx might edge up slightly as we build these products, but it won't compromise what we are, which is a capital-light group. And remember, we're building on the tech stack we already have. A lot of the infrastructure that Dave Hillary, Rob spoke about, build on tech we already have. So we will stay CapEx light. I hope that gives you enough color.

Thank you, Sharjeel. And the next one is for Hillary on Cab and around how it feels like a lot of players are interested in this space, and you're not going into competition with something like influential from Publicis? And how can you compete with their scale and data resources and how our pitch is different to their content creators.

Thank you so much for that question. So I think the most important thing to think about is what the audience actually wants. And in most cases, that's curation. There are so many content creators out there that it can be really overwhelming for the audience to understand which ones they should be following, which ones are the best, which ones actually are worth their time, and that's where we step in.

I think it's also important to note that this is a long-term partnership model. not a volume-based content pipeline. And we are giving the collaborators also really robust editorial support and brand integration we are investing in their growth and the goals that they have for their own personal brands, not just buying their content. And at the end of the day, I truly believe that this level of curation is what our audience is looking for.

Plus we've also already seen from some of the early talent that we have onboarded, they are so proud to be a part of these legacy brands. in this media landscape, the creators themselves need that legacy stamp of approval as a point of differentiation, and that's also something that we can give them. I hope that helps.

Thank you so much, Hillary. And the next one is for Rob on Signal. Can you see the question here? Signal, I can see that curated collections of products could be useful, but how will consumers find these at scale? What do you have to invest in marketing for consumers to find this offer?

Nick, thank you for the question. I'm glad you think they could be useful. We think so too. And that's what we're seeing so far. There's nothing new in terms of how we market these collections in terms of how we get audiences to these collections that we're not already doing at scale today, right? We're a content marketing organization.

It's our bread and butter. It's what we live and breathe, and you can see it across all of our sites today. The important thing is having the recommendation of what the customer should do to best meet their mission and then we'll market it in the ways that we already do. We'll push it through our organic social channels. We'll push it to our e-mail subscribers. We'll write articles supporting that collection that people can find on Google Discover, on Google Search.

So there's lots of things that will come without a cost, without a marketing expense to do that. At the same time, and again, we already do it in the e-commerce space. If we can see a financial return from doing things like paid search, we'll do things like paid search, but we always run by the numbers in terms of how we approach this. So yes, there we go. Hopefully, that answers the question.

Thanks, Rob. And you can say on because the next one is also for you in terms of Future+. Is there a cost to you to provide the rewards and benefit?

Yes, of course. Thank you. Yes, so I'm talking about this rather than Dave, because the rewards capability lives within my e-com function. It lives on my voucher codes today. So if you want to see it live in an action, you can go to my voucher codes. And whenever there's an offer that says something like buy the thing and get a GBP 10 gift voucher.

That's the rewards capability. But we're building it in a way that's much more flexible than that. So we'll still be able to do buy a TV, get a voucher or we'll able to do sign up for our e-mail and enter a competition to win dinner with our cycling expert, Dave Klutterbach, right? The flexibility is really, really key.

And the reason I'm telling you that is that plays to the commercial question that you're asking. So many of the things that we will do and we'll be able to do are 0 cost to us, but massive value to our audience. There are things that provide exclusive once-in-a-lifetime experiences or access, money can't buy kind of things.

On the flip side, look, we're highly commercial in the way that we use this rewards capability on my voucher codes. In many instances, it's entirely partner-funded, the giveaway. In other instances, it's exactly the same as my good old days in retail running a promotion. We will only do it if we are confident the uplift in conversion that you're getting offsets the cost of the reward. So look, we -- it's bread and butter to us.

We're now just expanding it from my voucher code where it lives already to the wider future proposition where we think we can make it really value-adding as part of our membership proposition. So again, thank you.

Thank you, Rob. Next one is for Hillary. Should we see this as a way to leverage social to a much greater degree?

Yes, in part. The way that we are looking at collab is that all boats rise with the tide. So we are looking at -- we have our collaborators, all have their own personal followings. They have their own robust audiences. They have their own dedicated audiences that they're obviously interested in growing as are we. So I think that we have a combined social just on Instagram alone, across Marie Claire And WhoWhatWear the collaborators who we are working with have a combined reach of close to $10 million on Instagram alone.

So we will benefit from them promoting their content. That hitting our platforms as well as vice versa. We have a pretty robust distribution plan in place and promotional plan using handshake tools to share that content. We also are experimenting with social shopping. So I think there's a lot of opportunity there, and it's also just very exciting all around. So hopefully, that helps explain that answer to you.

Thank you, Hillary. Next question, which is going to be split between Kevin and Sharjeel. First part, do you see any headwind or tailwinds because of AI developments and what that means in terms of the capital allocation strategy?

Thank you, Antoine, for your questions. And thank you for the question on AI. Look, we see AI in -- from 2 lens. It's an opportunity that we're leveraging an a risk that we acknowledge and we're building off that in order to future-proof that. But as we said at the half year, AI to us is 3 things, right? One, which is all about operational efficiency, finding the opportunities that it can unlock for us.

From the back office through to content that will be translating content and the likes, but also to leverage AI to build new products. In the recent past, we've launched Ad Genie for B2B, Adviser, which is a content recommendation to improve page views per session called Adviser for B2C. These are just 2 examples.

The second way is how we look at AI is through the lens of search, right? AI will help us push content in many ways that are much, much fine-tuned and targeted, but also allowing us through our investment in the AI audience initiative that was one of our 13 initiatives to better understand what does it take, what does it mean and how do we surface the right particular bit of information that is valuable to our consumers via the likes of AI overview or ChatGPT, for example.

And TechRadar is performing extremely well at this moment in time in ChatGPT. And the third and final lens is the generative AI piece that we look at it, which is the third pillar of how we see AI within the company. And that is not only TechRadar performing well, but also leveraging our partnership with OpenAI to better mutually build an ecosystem that is rewarding for both the consumer, chatGPT and ourselves. This is hopefully answering your question.

Stuff, I'll take the capital allocation part of this. So the capital allocation remains very much the same that I took everyone through at the half year. But let me just give you a bit more color. What we're talking about today is that very first bucket that I spoke about, organic investment. That's, to me, always drives the best return on investment, capital employed, the IRR when I look at all the metrics, that's where I get my best bang for buck.

And all the things we talked about today can add signal Futures are building on what we have today, investing organically through CapEx and our people and our assets. We have all of those that's going to drive the best return. The 3 we talked about, the 10 that are coming. We'll talk more about those at a future webinar. So that is exciting because, as I said in my first answer, we're tapping into areas of the digital media market that are growing faster than the core that we are in.

And that what's going back to the very first question, is going to drive our organic growth in the future. And then the second bucket we've had in capital allocation is around bolt-ons, and one of them was featured today, right? Dave talked about Quizly and what we've done with that. You'll hear about renewal at a future one in terms of what we've done with that and when it comes to market, what we'll do in terms of retention on go Go.compare. So hopefully, that gives you a bit of color.

After that, I've talked about strategic M&A being blanked out at the moment. The Board always looks at dividends. And we'll continue to look at the dividend. And if we've got any money left and it's excess cash, we will return it to shareholders like we have been doing. So hopefully, that ties the capital allocation policy into what you saw today.

Thank you, both. Back to Rob. How will you compete with Timi and Sean?

Great stuff. Yes, look, I'm fascinated with how the retail sector is evolving at the moment. I don't have any desire to be a better retailer than a retailer, and I don't think I have to be. I've been there, and I think it's more fun here. We don't have to manage stock levels and sell-through.

I don't have to manage gross margin mix, supplier funding, all of the things that as a buyer would take me away from doing the right thing for the customer. On top of that, my profitability isn't going to be shredded by e-commerce logistics or even worse returns. So we've got a lot of advantages. That means we can do what we're here to do, which is focus on the customer, focus on giving them trusted expert advice focus on curating and giving them the best ideas of what they should be buying and focus on making an experience that's fun and engaging.

So I think we've got lots of differences between us and retailers. We partner with a lot of retailers. And obviously, we look to learn from the great things that other retailers are doing, like you look at TV, you'll continue, for example, some of the gamification they do is great. And you're seeing some of that in the Future+ proposition that Dave was talking about as well.

Thank you very much, Rob. And next question is for Kevin. How does the GoCompare platform fit into the new strategy?

Thank you, Stuart, for the question. Great question. One of the initial 13 initiatives is all about membership in Go.Compare. And that's been driven by the acquisition of renewal, which we spoke about at the half year. And -- but also leveraging GoCo as a platform in order to actually enable membership, and this is just the start, where we'll cover more at the full year in December.

Thank you very much, Kevin. And next one, you can stay on because the next one is for you as well. And that's from Nick on when we talk to investors about SEU and AI search world, they often worry that there is no way for sites to win traffic because so many questions are answered by the LLMs before you link to any other content. So what can you do to improve your traffic in this changing search environment?

That must be, Nick. Thank you, Nick, for the question. And great question. Look, what we are focusing on is leveraging that strong foundation of future, right? And also we have brands. Brands are everything in this day and age, especially when you think about the ChatGPT, right? You're constructing answers and there will be citation, but the citation, first of all, if you look at it, it's all about mentioning of the brands. Now to us, it's also about -- and to answer to your question, it's also about understanding how consumers out there are utilizing ChatGPT and the likes.

What is it that they need? What are the -- is it that they're looking for? What is it that they need in order to do their day-to-day sort of live. And as I mentioned, we have that in -- that strategic initiative, which is the AI audience, which is exactly focusing on understanding that ecosystem, understanding how do we connect via this new touch point, right, effectively, efficiently, rapidly but also with a good ROI. So this is in continuum.

We're making good progress on this, and we shall be reporting on it more soon.

We've got a nice follow-up on this topic. So Kev, you can stay on. To Nick's question, how do you see click-through rates when your sites are cited in AI reviews?

Thank you, Alastair. In terms of the performance of AI overview, right, I think that our own sort of like data analytics reveals in terms of the prevalence of AI overview against our own search term to be sort of like low 30% and also depending on which brand, which vertical, the time of day and the duration, right, there will be sort of like movements and fluidity in the click-through rates.

Overall, it's fair to say that we are experiencing like a degradation in click-through rates. But again, it puts and present trough in other parts, it's actually working okay. And in other parts, it's working well, meaning people will click and come to us to complete that experience on our sites. So it's puts and takes depending on many variables. But it's also worth mentioning that we are -- our audience mix is highly diversified in a similar way how future as a group is highly diversified and that is our strength.

Thanks, Kevin. A popular topic is the TechRadar. ChatGPT success based on the working agents with OpenAI. And that's one for you, Kevin, again.

Thank you, Jonathan, for the question. The answer is TechRadar really knows how to connect. TechRadar knows what the consumer wants and needs. And so therefore, we are writing what ultimately connects. And of course, as I've said, the generative engine the AI overviews, the -- dare I say it, the legacy SEO Google Search, they love our content too.

So therefore, as long as we are cited, right, that's good for us, both from a branding perspective and also from an audience traffic referral point of view. So yes, I hope that helps.

Thank you, Kevin. Changing gears slightly back to Hillary on the rise of video-led. So people moving more from video as opposed to written content.

Yes. I think about shopping all the time as a matter of fact. And I think one of the things that we do so well is that we meet the audience where the audience is. So if they are on site, we give them a great shopping experience there. If they're following us on social depending on the platform, we are giving them great shopping content there.

So to me, it's really about taking the best market, the best buying guides the best content and then creating original content for a wide variety of platforms based off of that. I don't see text-based content and text-based storytelling and text-based shopping, and that will always be important.

That's sort of the anchor for everything else. But then from there, you across different platforms to make sure that we are capturing the audience where they are and meet their intent where they are. So we're already doing this, and this is part of our robust 360 content distribution plan. So -- and I often test all of this on myself. So thank you for that question.

Thank you so much, Hillary. That was our last question because we're about time. So thank you all for tuning in. The event will be available on replay as well. Thank you for joining us this afternoon, and I'll just give the last words to Kevin.

I'm hoping that you found this session valuable that you have gained a better understanding of our strategy, and all the actions underway to deliver flawlessly on it. I hope you will come away from this session as excited as we are about our future. Thank you for listening, and we look forward to our full year results on the 4th of December.