Why we built QuoteYeti

Insurance comparison is one of the most-searched, least-trustworthy corners of the internet.

Search for “best auto insurance” and you’ll get a stack of sites that look editorial but read like sales pitches. Rankings shift based on who’s paying. Reviews are positive in roughly the same proportion as which carriers have active partnerships. The “methodology” pages are often vague to the point of meaning nothing.

We built QuoteYeti because the category needs an independent player. This is an honest accounting of why, and how we plan to keep it honest.

What we saw

Three things, mostly.

One: the existing comparison sites operate on a clear incentive misalignment. They’re paid by carriers to send leads. The more leads they send, the more they earn. The carriers paying the most for leads — usually not the carriers offering the best products — get the most prominent placement, the highest rankings, the most flattering reviews.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s how the industry openly works. Some sites are transparent about it; most aren’t. Either way, the consumer reading “Top 10 Insurance Companies for 2024” is reading marketing, not research.

Two: the editorial content on most insurance sites is genuinely bad. AI-generated filler. Surface-level overviews that repeat the same five points across every page. Paid placements presented as recommendations. The information consumers need to make good decisions — actual rate comparisons, real policy fine-print analysis, honest discussion of which carriers handle claims well — is largely missing.

Three: the consumers are sophisticated and want better. Insurance is one of the largest line items in most household budgets. People want to understand it, want to optimize it, and are willing to spend time learning if the content is actually useful. The existing sites don’t serve that audience.

What we built

QuoteYeti is an independent insurance research and comparison publisher across eight verticals: auto, home, life, business, health, renters, pet, and travel.

The structural commitments:

• Editorial independence from partnerships. We earn referral compensation when readers request quotes through our partner network — that’s how we pay our team. But the editorial team is structurally separated from the partnerships team, and partnership status is not a factor in our scoring methodology. We have ranked partner carriers poorly. We have ranked non-partner carriers highly. The compensation does not move the rankings.

• Documented methodology. Every ranking is built from a published scoring rubric. The weights are on the methodology page. The data sources are listed. If we make a factual claim, we cite it. If we make a judgment call, we say so.

• No AI-generated content. Every review is drafted by an editor with domain knowledge, fact-checked against the underlying data, and reviewed by a second editor before publication. We don’t accept ghostwritten content from carriers. We don’t publish sponsored reviews presented as editorial.

• Transparent partnerships. When you see partner offers on our thank-you pages, they’re clearly labeled as sponsored. The FTC requires disclosure; we go further and explain exactly how the model works on our partners page.

• Quarterly content reviews. Insurance markets change constantly. Pages get reviewed at minimum every quarter, and breaking changes trigger immediate updates.

Who we are

QuoteYeti is built and operated by three people across three time zones:

• David Krug, Founder & CEO — based in the US. 20-year career in higher education and lead generation. Former Director of SEO at Quote.com and BestCarInsurance.
• Rai Antonio, VP of Editorial — based in Cebu, Philippines. 10-year veteran in higher-education content. MBA. Financial-content specialist.
• Felix Lucero, VP of Technology — based in Guadalajara, Mexico. Astro developer, architect of our proprietary lead-flow system, data scientist focused on insurance pricing models.

The full team page is at /about/.

How we make money

We earn commission when readers request quotes through our partner network. This is disclosed on every page where it’s relevant. The compensation amount varies by vertical, carrier, and consumer profile.

Compensation goes to QuoteYeti as a publisher, not to individual editors or anyone involved in producing rankings or reviews. The editorial team’s compensation is unrelated to which carriers earn the highest commissions.

This model has a built-in tension: we’re paid by partners, and we produce content that may favor or disfavor those partners. The way we manage that tension is structural separation. The editorial team doesn’t know which carriers are highest-paying. The partnerships team doesn’t influence what the editorial team writes.

It’s not a perfect model. No publisher’s model is. But it’s a model where the incentives can be openly explained and audited, which is more than most of the industry offers.

What we’ll do over time

The plan over the next 18 months:

• Build deep, defensible content across all eight verticals
• Develop tooling that makes our research auditable (visible methodology, clear data sources, public scoring rubrics)
• Expand into state-specific content where regulations and markets vary significantly
• Build the editorial team to support quarterly content refresh cycles across the entire library
• Partner with subject-matter experts in claims, underwriting, and regulatory work to ground our content in field expertise

We’re also explicit about what we’re not trying to do:

• We’re not trying to be the largest insurance comparison site. We’re trying to be the most useful one.
• We’re not trying to win on SEO volume. We’re trying to win on reader trust.
• We’re not trying to be all things to all readers. We’re trying to be the place a reasonably-informed consumer can go to get a clear, honest answer.

What you can do

If our content is useful, share it. Word of mouth matters more than SEO for the audience we’re trying to reach.

If we get something wrong, tell us. Email editor@quoteyeti.com with the URL and the error. We will investigate, and if we publish a correction, it’ll be noted at the top of the page with the date.

If you have questions about a specific situation that our content doesn’t address, write to us. We genuinely want to know what readers are getting stuck on — the gaps in our coverage point to what to build next.

The category needs better. We’re trying to build it.

— David Krug, Founder