Zeta Global on November 9, 2026 reported third-quarter revenue of $492.7 million, up 46% from $337.2 million a year earlier, and raised its full-year 2026 revenue forecast by $37 million to $1,855 million at the midpoint. The New York-based marketing technology company, which now describes itself as "the intelligent AI infrastructure company," posted GAAP net income of $38.3 million for the three months to September 30, against a loss of $3.6 million in the same period of 2025.

Much of the headline growth was bought rather than built. Marigold's enterprise business, acquired late last year, contributed $48.0 million of the quarter's revenue, and political candidates added another $7.4 million. Strip both out and revenue rose 30%, up from 28% in the second quarter on the same basis. On the earnings call that followed, chief executive David A. Steinberg went further than the numbers, telling analysts that "for the first time" advertisers were moving meaningful budget to Zeta from search, as Google answers more queries itself.

In Short

Zeta Global, a US company that sells marketing software and customer data, said on November 9, 2026 that its quarterly revenue grew 46% to $493 million, or 30% without an acquisition and political ads, and it now expects $1.855 billion for the full year. It matters to marketers because Zeta says its AI assistant, Athena, is pulling more client spending onto its platform, and its chief executive claims money is starting to leave Google search for Zeta, though he gave no figures to back that up. What changes next is a larger, more profitable Zeta selling against Salesforce and Braze while plugging its tools into ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, with a new product, AthenaOS, due for general release in the first quarter of 2027.

The quarter in figures

The result cleared Zeta's own forecast with some room. Revenue came in $22 million, or 5%, above the midpoint of guidance, according to the company. Adjusted EBITDA, Zeta's preferred profit measure, reached $121.0 million, up 55% from $78.1 million, for a margin of 24.6% against 23.2% a year earlier. That was $5.5 million above the guidance midpoint, according to chief financial officer Chris Greiner.

Sequentially, the business grew 11% from the $442.8 million reported for the second quarter, a PPC Land calculation from the two quarterly releases. Over the first nine months of 2026, revenue reached $1,331.7 million, up 46% from $910.0 million.

The cost lines tell a story of scale. Cost of revenue, excluding depreciation and amortization, was $195.6 million, or 39.7% of revenue - 120 basis points lower than in the second quarter but 20 basis points higher than a year earlier. Selling and marketing expenses rose 28% to $109.4 million, slower than revenue. Research and development climbed 39% to $41.5 million. General and administrative costs reached $75.0 million.

Excluding stock-based compensation, research and development, general and administrative, and selling and marketing came to 6.1%, 12.3% and 17.3% of revenue respectively, improving by five, 20 and 140 basis points year over year, according to Greiner. Sales and marketing, in his words, "remained the biggest source of leverage."

Operating income was $45.9 million, against $8.8 million a year earlier. After $3.7 million of other expenses and a $4.0 million tax provision, net income landed at $38.3 million, a 7.8% margin. Diluted GAAP earnings per share were $0.14, which Zeta called a record. Non-GAAP net income was $102.9 million, or $0.38 a share, up from $61.5 million and $0.24.

"Delivering 46% revenue growth and achieving the rule of 71 demonstrate the strength and demand for Zeta's intelligent AI infrastructure," Steinberg said in the release. Greiner, in the same document, attributed the quarter to "accelerating revenue growth driven by increased Athena adoption and usage."

How much of the 46% is organic

The reconciliation tables in the release are where the headline number gets its context. Zeta bought Marigold's enterprise business in a deal that PPC Land reported in October 2025 was priced at up to $325 million. That unit has contributed $55.6 million, $48.1 million and $48.0 million in the first three quarters of 2026, and Zeta expects $47.5 million in the fourth, for $199 million across the year. Political candidate revenue, immaterial in earlier quarters, reached $7.4 million in the third quarter.

Remove both and revenue was $437.3 million, which compares with the full $337.2 million reported a year earlier. That gives the 30% figure. The year-ago base already included LiveIntent, the identity company Zeta agreed to buy in October 2024 for $250 million, so the comparison is not distorted by that deal.

Greiner said the third quarter was the 22nd consecutive quarter of growth above 20% on this basis. The growth rate has moved in a narrow band through 2026: 29% in the first quarter, 28% in the second, 30% in the third, and a guided 23% in the fourth, according to the supplemental presentation.

That distinction matters for the company's signature metric. Zeta defines the Rule of 71 as revenue growth plus adjusted EBITDA margin adding up to 71 or more "on a rounded basis." The calculation uses total growth of 46.1%, Marigold included, plus the 24.6% margin, which sums to 70.7. Using organic growth instead, the figure would be roughly 54, a PPC Land calculation. Three months earlier, the same arithmetic produced what Zeta called the rule of 64.

Profit, cash and the cost of equity pay

The third quarter was Zeta's second consecutive quarter of positive GAAP net income, after $8.2 million in the second quarter, and the nine-month total has turned positive at $33.2 million, compared with a $38.0 million loss in the first nine months of 2025.

Stock-based compensation explains much of the gap between GAAP and adjusted profit. It was $50.0 million in the quarter, up 10% from $45.6 million, though it fell as a share of revenue to 10.1% from 13.5%, a PPC Land calculation. Greiner traced a longer arc. "Since 2023, we reduced SBC as a percentage of revenue from 33% to 19% to 14% to 12% year-to-date through September 2026, and we expect that trend to continue," he said. GAAP net income in the first nine months of 2026 was $185 million better than in the same period of 2023, according to the CFO.

Buybacks absorbed part of the cash. Zeta spent $29.9 million on 1.3 million shares in the quarter, an average of about $23 a share by PPC Land's arithmetic. Repurchases totalled $101.4 million in 2026 through November 9, with $62.6 million left on the current authorization, and Greiner said the company "would contemplate doing another one after this." Net dilution in the quarter was 1.1%, and Zeta said it remained on course for its 3% to 4% net dilution target for the year.

Cash generation outpaced earnings. Net cash from operating activities was $91.3 million, up 58%, and free cash flow reached $81.5 million, up 73% from $47.1 million. Free cash flow margin was 16.5%. Conversion of adjusted EBITDA into free cash flow hit 67.3%, a 700 basis point improvement and, according to the supplemental, a record. Greiner credited discipline on operating expenses and capital spending, and "a really healthy receivables and payables process."

The balance sheet carries several items the release does not explain. Cash and equivalents stood at $340.1 million at September 30, up from $319.8 million at the end of 2025. Long-term borrowings rose to $243.9 million from $197.1 million: Zeta drew $255.8 million on its credit facilities in the nine months and repaid $210.0 million. The cash flow statement records $70.0 million of "loan advances" as an investing outflow, and other non-current assets jumped to $91.8 million from $4.7 million. Neither the release nor the supplemental identifies the borrower or the terms. Acquisitions and other investments consumed a further $51.1 million, net of cash acquired. Current acquisition-related liabilities fell to $25.2 million from $149.0 million, while the cash flow statement shows only $13.2 million of cash payments against such liabilities; the documents do not say how the rest was settled.

The raised outlook

Zeta lifted every line of its forecast. For the fourth quarter, it now expects revenue of $521 million to $525 million, up $15 million at the midpoint from $508 million. That implies growth of 32% to 33%, or 22% to 24% excluding acquisitions and political revenue. Adjusted EBITDA guidance moved to $135.2 million to $136.3 million, a margin of 25.7% to 26.2%.

For the full year, the revenue range is $1,853 million to $1,857 million, against a previous midpoint of $1,818 million. Growth would be 42%, or 27% on an organic basis. Greiner noted that Zeta started 2026 guiding to 21% organic growth, and that the year's cumulative raises on that basis add up to $85 million. The forecast midpoint had already been lifted from $1,785 million in August.

Adjusted EBITDA guidance rose $9.4 million to $414.1 million to $415.2 million, a margin of 22.3% to 22.4% and growth of 49%. Free cash flow guidance went up $15.8 million at the midpoint to $270.6 million to $271.6 million, which would be conversion of 65% - the level Zeta set as its 2028 target. GAAP earnings per share guidance moved to $0.22 to $0.24, from $0.09 to $0.11. The company noted the original 2026 guidance was $0.03, which makes the new midpoint more than seven times higher.

That EPS range leaves out a potentially large item. Zeta says it excludes "the potential impact of a one-time, non-cash tax benefit from the release of a portion of our valuation allowance, which we believe has a reasonable possibility of occurring within the next 12 months." No amount is given.

Political candidate revenue is now expected at $13 million in the fourth quarter, $5 million more than previously forecast, for about $20 million in the year. Greiner said Zeta exceeded its third-quarter political forecast despite a later start to the cycle.

Two caveats run through the guidance. According to Greiner, the outlook "assumes minimal contributions from partnerships," including only signed pilots, and builds in "a 2%-5% cushion consistent with our typical conservatism." On 2027, he declined to give numbers before February but described the habit. Since its first full-year guidance in February 2022, Zeta has opened each year by guiding to 20% to 21% organic growth. Steinberg, asked about growth drivers, said the partnerships "should add materially to growth next year, which is why I think Chris feels comfortable talking about a two-handle on the start of our guidance for next year."

Athena: the numbers behind the AI pitch

Athena is Zeta's voice-enabled conversational agent, which reached general availability for all Zeta Marketing Platform customers in March. Zeta reports its adoption through what it calls an AI Scorecard, and the third-quarter version added several data points.

More than 50% of super-scaled customers were monthly active Athena users, up from just over 40% in the second quarter. Across the whole customer base, "Athena adopters" accounted for more than 70% of revenue. The top 25 Athena users grew revenue more than 70% in the quarter, against 46% for the company. For Athena adopters, year-to-date net revenue retention ran more than 500 basis points above Zeta's overall rate. Client campaign development more than doubled quarter over quarter, and hours spent on the platform rose more than 50% sequentially.

Some of those figures are harder to read than they look. In August, Zeta's disclosures put its full AI adopters at 20% of customers and 70% of revenue. The third-quarter documents give "over 70%" of revenue for Athena adopters but no share of the customer count, and they do not say whether "Athena adopters" and "full AI adopters" are the same group. On the revenue measure alone, the share has barely moved. The top-25 comparison also sets the company's heaviest users against a company-wide growth rate that includes Marigold.

Steinberg offered an analogy for why adopters spend more. "We have built, like almost all enterprise software companies, a fighter jet, which is an incredibly complex piece of equipment to fly, and most of our clients know how to fly a Cessna," he said. Athena, in his description, "allows the client to fly the entire plane with her as their co-pilot." He also claimed Zeta delivers "a 600%-700% return on marketing spend" and "approximately 300% return on investment for every dollar spent on our technology." No methodology for either figure was given on the call or in the presentation.

Greiner said Zeta uses the scorecard internally to forecast revenue. Steinberg added that campaign set-ups and audience builds are "actually forecast capabilities to revenue."

Customers, channels and the direct-mix drift

The count of super-scaled customers - those generating at least $1 million in trailing twelve-month revenue - rose to 212 from 180 a year earlier and 197 in the second quarter. The 18% annual increase sits well above the 4% to 8% compound growth modelled in Zeta's 2028 plan. Average revenue per super-scaled customer reached $2.0 million, up 22%, against a modelled 12% to 16%.

Expansion within accounts was the main theme. Super-scaled customers using all three of Zeta's marketing use cases - acquire, grow and retain - increased more than 60%, as did those using five or more channels. Cross-sell and upsell deals won in the quarter rose 38%. Greiner gave two unnamed examples: one of North America's largest telecom providers ramped to more than $10 million with Zeta in 12 months, moving from one channel to four, and a beauty retailer with more than 1,500 locations grew its spending by more than 85% after adding a third channel.

Steinberg cited an automotive services company with more than 4,000 locations that achieved "a 20% lower cost per incremental acquisition and a 450% uplift in conversions across multiple channels," and a Fortune 500 rural lifestyle retailer that replaced three vendors with Zeta, "generating $1.5 million in annual technology savings and delivering a 75% faster campaign execution." None of the customers was named.

One metric moved the other way. Direct platform revenue - revenue generated entirely through Zeta's own platform rather than through integrations with third parties - fell to 71% of the total, from 75% a year earlier and 72% in the second quarter. That puts it near the bottom of the 70% to 75% range Zeta models for 2025 to 2028. Greiner tied the 20 basis point annual rise in cost of revenue to "continued strength in social channel adoption by agencies." PPC Land reported in May on how agencies became a growth source in the first quarter, when direct revenue was 75% and cost of revenue had risen to 41%.

On the sales side, RFPs set a quarterly record, up more than 100% year over year, according to Greiner, who said that figure excluded opportunities from Zeta Live, Palantir and Salesforce's planned purchase of Braze. Pipeline creation per seller rose 32% and average pipeline per seller 19%. Greiner put quota carrier headcount growth at 11% to 203; the supplemental's own figures, 180 a year earlier and 203 now, imply about 13%. Seven of Zeta's top ten verticals grew more than 20% on a trailing twelve-month basis, and consumer discretionary sectors such as retail, travel and automotive grew more than 40% collectively, according to the CFO.

Steinberg on Google: from "and" to "or"

The most consequential remarks for search marketers came in answer to an analyst question about how new customers ramp. Steinberg turned to Google.

"As Google continues to answer more and more of the queries on their platform through Gemini, on their own platform, the cost per click has gotten to the point of diminishing marginal return for a lot of advertisers," he said. "But for the first time that we have been doing this, and we have been doing this a long time, we are starting to see meaningful budget move to Zeta from what was in search originally." Zeta's pitch used to be additive to a client's search budget, he said. "It is now for the first time becoming an or."

He then offered statistics. "My understanding is up to 68% of all queries on Google are now being answered by Gemini. 90+% of queries used to result in a click to a brand and e-commerce platform or a publisher. That is now down to 32%." Later in the call, responding to Citi's Ron Josey, he described "the contraction of those clicks to 33% of what they used to be approximately," and said cost per click "has skyrocketed." He did not name a source for any of these figures, and the two descriptions of the click decline are not the same measure: one is a share of queries, the other a share of former click volume.

Steinberg also claimed that "for the first time ever, we are delivering a substantially higher return on marketing spend than search is today." He gave no comparison data and no dollar value for the budgets he said were moving. He was careful to add that Zeta partners with Google and that "this is not meant to be sort of a disparagement of them."

Independent research covered by PPC Land points in the same direction on organic clicks, though not at the scale Steinberg described. Seer Interactive found that organic click-through rates on informational queries with AI Overviews fell 61%, and paid click-through rates 68%, between June 2024 and September 2025. Ahrefs measured a 58% lower click-through rate for top-ranking pages when an AI Overview appeared, using December 2025 data. The broader phenomenon is known as zero-click search.

Google's own disclosures paint a less dramatic picture on the paid side. Alphabet reported on October 28 that paid clicks rose 8% in the third quarter of 2026, slower than the 11% recorded across the first nine months, while average cost per click rose 4%. Slowing click growth and rising prices are consistent with Steinberg's direction of travel. A 4% increase in average cost per click is not what most advertisers would describe as having "skyrocketed," although company-wide averages can conceal far steeper rises in individual categories.

GEO, Senso and agentic shopping

Zeta's response to that shift runs partly through GEO, the practice of shaping how brands appear in AI-generated answers. Zeta launched a GEO product in September 2025 and in October agreed to buy Senso, the startup whose technology helps power it.

Asked by William Blair's Arjun Bhatia how Senso would be sold, Steinberg was explicit. "A lot of people are looking at GEO as a new strategy. We see GEO as a new channel. It is part of the existing platform. Senso will fully integrate into the Zeta platform," he said. He described it as a platform that "helps us move clients from certain search methodologies into frontier models," and as a bet on shopping agents. Senso, he said, "allows us to help our clients get those shopping agents focused on their products versus their competitors."

The CEO also described his own use of personal AI agents, naming Instinct, Muse and Dot, and said he had built a Dot he named Alfred that helps with e-commerce and his calendar.

Zeta also agreed in October to buy Digital Audience, an identity and activation company, and Steinberg said on the call that both deals are "highly accretive to our Data Cloud signals." The forward-looking statements in the release refer to "recent acquisitions of Senso Agentic Inc. and Social Audience B.V." The release does not explain the second name, and Zeta has disclosed no price for either transaction.

Salesforce and Braze

Analysts raised Salesforce's agreement to buy Braze, which PPC Land reported on October 21 is valued at about $5.66 billion, with completion expected in Salesforce's fiscal year 2028. Steinberg treated it as an opening.

"Neither Salesforce nor Braze has AI native to its architecture," he said in prepared remarks, arguing that enterprises transforming around AI do not need "uncertainty about product roadmaps, integration, and execution." In the Q&A, he said Zeta competes with Salesforce's Marketing Cloud, which he described as "consistently shrinking," and characterized Braze as primarily a mobile platform. He said integrating the two would, "by their own words," take up to two years, without saying where that estimate was published.

"We've been clear about the fact we already win greater than 50% of the RFPs and pilots we get asked to participate in. I think we could see that percentage go up because of this," Steinberg said. He added that "this is not to say they're not both good companies with great leaders."

Palantir, OpenAI and a headless Athena

Zeta's growth story increasingly leans on partners, and the call offered progress reports with few numbers attached.

On Palantir, Steinberg said the companies are "up to eight yeses" on joint customer agreements. One, he said, would become a super-scaled client "by the end of this month," two are actively operating, and the rest are in contract. Zeta has fully integrated its Data Cloud on Palantir's Foundry platform, using its ontology. Steinberg repeated the expectation, first set out when the partnership was announced in June, that it can add more than $100 million in incremental annual revenue "in the years to come." Palantir opportunities are not included in Zeta's reported pipeline figures, he said, and the supplemental describes the relationship as a seven-year partnership with joint go-to-market.

On OpenAI, Steinberg said Zeta is working with the company on "its emerging advertising business, where we are already actively serving ads on the platform." The supplemental dates Zeta's partnership with OpenAI's advertising operations to January 2026. OpenAI's ad pilot launched on February 9 and reached $100 million in annualized revenue within six weeks; when StackAdapt joined the pilot in May, the publicly named partners were Criteo, Kargo, Adobe and Pacvue. Zeta did not disclose how much it spends or earns through ChatGPT ads.

The bigger product change is what analysts called a headless strategy. Athena MCP, announced at Zeta Live, will extend Zeta's intelligence into environments "such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini," according to Steinberg, using MCP, the protocol that lets AI assistants call external tools. "This is a pivot for us," he said. "I have always been, 'We need to control everything,' and now I'm saying the UI can actually exist in a third-party platform."

He drew a firm line around the data. "No third party will ever have access to our Data Cloud. They will never have access to our data. We keep that for our own models and our own algorithms. All of the activation will continue to exclusively go through our platform."

AthenaOS, the enterprise "operating system" unveiled at Zeta Live in October alongside work on a specialized chip with an unnamed partner, is in alpha. Select customers should begin using a beta this year, with general availability expected in the first quarter of 2027. Steinberg said the most common uses so far outside marketing are inventory management, supply chain management, and fraud detection and cybersecurity, with one large financial services company using Zeta for fraud detection.

The Athena Inference Model, a set of specialized models being developed with Fireworks and built on NVIDIA Nemotron, "achieved a 95% accuracy, exceeding frontier models at a 40% lower cost per request and six times faster response time," according to Steinberg. The benchmark, the tasks and the models compared were not identified.

Zeta's own engineering is changing too. Greiner said automatically generated code continues to "hover around 90%" of total output. Steinberg said code automation has cut the time from idea to shipment by 27% and that engineers are "shipping roughly twice as much code each week."

Valued as martech, built as infrastructure

The supplemental presentation, 62 pages long, spends a dozen of them arguing that investors misread the company. A slide titled "Valued as martech, built as infrastructure" contrasts "a vertical SaaS tool sold to CMOs" with "an intelligence layer consumed across use cases," and concludes: "The gap between these two columns is the entire repositioning opportunity."

The case rests on a peer comparison with Palantir, Datadog, CrowdStrike, MongoDB and Snowflake. Zeta places itself at roughly 3 times enterprise value to revenue against 7 to 34 times for the group, and at a 5% free cash flow yield against a 2% average, using FactSet data as of July 29, 2026. Its 2025 net revenue retention of 120%, which excludes LiveIntent, sits alongside the peers' 115% to 139%.

One figure on that slide does not match its own label. The chart is headed "Last fiscal year" and shows Zeta at 71% on a "Rule of 40" measure of revenue growth plus adjusted EBITDA margin; a footnote states that all measures on the page are for the most recently reported fiscal year, except free cash flow yield. Zeta's full-year 2025 revenue rose to $1,305 million from $1,006 million, about 30%, at an adjusted EBITDA margin of 21.4%, which adds up to about 51 by PPC Land's calculation from the same deck. The 71 corresponds to the third quarter of 2026.

The data asset underneath

Zeta's defence against commoditized AI models is its data. The deck describes an identity graph covering "535M+" individuals globally, "trillions" of consumer signals, and "20 years" of proprietary data, governance and model tuning, describing it as "not dependent on cookies or third-party brokers."

The presentation also breaks down where that graph comes from. LiveIntent, the email newsletter and website monetization business, contributes an estimated 20% to 25%. Zeta's demand-side platform and Disqus, the publisher comments and polls tool, each contribute 15% to 20%. Zeta's email message transfer agent and third-party sources, with LiveRamp given as an example, add 10% to 15% each. Its supply-side platform contributes 3% to 5%, and owned-and-operated properties such as ArcaMax less than 1%.

The permission figures in the appendix are older than the rest of the deck. They show 245 million US individuals who gave permission to online tracking by agreeing to publisher terms of service, and 110 million who opted in to email, and are labelled "as of November 2024."

Asked about recent changes to third-party identifiers, including at Apple, Steinberg said Zeta does not rely on them. "Them eliminating it does not make Zeta's platform better, but as other platforms deteriorate, it doesn't make our platform worse," he said.

Market reaction

The results topped analyst expectations. According to Investing.com, consensus forecasts were $0.28 in adjusted earnings per share and $470.86 million in revenue. Zeta shares closed the regular session on November 9 at $32.42, up 4.48% from $31.03, before slipping 3.33% to $31.34 in after-hours trading, according to the same source, which also put the 52-week range at $14.37 to $35.75.

Why this matters for the marketing community

Zeta has spent 2026 assembling pieces that touch almost every part of a marketer's stack: an email and customer data platform, a demand-side platform, a publisher identity network through LiveIntent and Disqus, an AI agent, a GEO product, and now a seat inside OpenAI's ad business. The third quarter showed that combination generating cash at a margin it has not reached before, and a 46% revenue increase that is still 30% after removing the largest acquisition.

For advertisers weighing marketing cloud contracts, Salesforce's move on Braze and Zeta's pitch against it set up a competitive cycle that will play out through 2027. For search marketers, the more provocative claim is Steinberg's account of budgets leaving Google. That claim came without figures, and Alphabet's own third-quarter data still show paid clicks growing. Yet the CEO of a company with 212 clients each spending more than $1 million a year says he is now pitched as a replacement for search spending rather than an addition to it. That is a shift in how one large vendor sells, whatever the data eventually show.

Several questions remain open. The documents do not explain the $70 million in loan advances, do not quantify ChatGPT ad activity, and do not define how "Athena adopters" are counted. AthenaOS is still in alpha. The Palantir partnership is described in yeses rather than revenue. Zeta's February guidance for 2027 will be the first test of whether partnerships that have so far not contributed materially show up in the numbers.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Zeta Global (NYSE: ZETA), the New York marketing technology and data company led by co-founder and chief executive David A. Steinberg and chief financial officer Chris Greiner, along with partners and rivals named on its earnings call, including Palantir, OpenAI, Salesforce and Braze.

What: Third-quarter revenue rose 46% to $492.7 million, or 30% excluding Marigold and political candidate revenue. Net income was $38.3 million, adjusted EBITDA $121.0 million and free cash flow $81.5 million. Zeta raised its 2026 revenue forecast to $1,855 million at the midpoint and its GAAP EPS forecast to $0.23. Steinberg said advertisers are beginning to move budget from search to Zeta, without giving figures.

When: The results were released on November 9, 2026, for the quarter ended September 30, 2026, and discussed on a call at 4:30 p.m. Eastern Time the same day. AthenaOS general availability is expected in the first quarter of 2027, and 2027 guidance in February.

Where: Zeta is headquartered in New York and listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Steinberg cited a London hub running Europe and operations in Canada, Japan and Brazil.

Why: The quarter shows a company growing at about 30% organically while turning GAAP-profitable and converting two-thirds of adjusted EBITDA into cash. Zeta is using that cash and its data to argue it should be valued as AI infrastructure rather than marketing software, and to position itself against Salesforce, Braze and, by its chief executive's account, Google search budgets.