×· Q4 2026
— days to the spring 2027 buying season

What new borrowers from search are worth to CMG Home Loans in funded loans

Half of CMG Home Loans' organic clicks land on login and servicing pages, and only ~3% come from searches without CMG's or a loan officer's name (Similarweb, 2026). Guild and CrossCountry Mortgage get 2–4× the organic traffic of CMG's two sites combined (Ahrefs). CMG's search ads, ~$4.6K a month by Similarweb's estimate, buy its own name. Pick a tier, then replace our placeholder rates with CMG's own.

Organic search and AI answers
6,000
From loan-program, All In One and state pages, and branch and loan-officer pages that rank for their towns. Today ~930 organic clicks a month come from non-branded searches. Pages take 3–6 months to rank.
0
Kept at 0 in the headline. AI assistants send ~1,200 visits a month today (Similarweb) and cite CMG 58 times (Ahrefs); 29% of US home buyers mainly use AI to research brands (GWI Core, 2025–26).
Paid search: non-brand ads
$25,000
On first-time-buyer, loan-program and "lender near me" searches, landing on the program and local pages. New budget: today's ads (~$4.6K a month, Similarweb estimate) run on CMG's own name.
$11.00
Placeholder until Keyword Planner for CMG's states. Similarweb CPCs on 12 commercial mortgage searches in CMG's data run $3.73–35.15 (median ~$10.75); refinance terms run $31–35.
From visit to funded loan
2.0%
Placeholder until CMG shares its own. Finance & Insurance search ads convert at 2.64% (LocaliQ, 2026); non-branded organic visits usually convert lower.
12%
Placeholder. The least certain rate here: see the sensitivity table.
$11,900
Placeholder. Independent mortgage banks earned $11,909 of production revenue a loan in Q2 2026 (MBA: 333 bps on a $386K average loan), before $10,936 of production costs.
New loan revenue a year
$2.84M
238
funded loans a year
2.6×
revenue per $1 of non-brand ads
$2.34M
in year one, pages ramping
Funded loans a month, by channel
Non-brand ads
5.5
New pages
14.4
AI answers
0.0
Cost per funded loan and what the page visits are worth
$4,583
of ad clicks per funded loan
$66K
a month to buy the page visits as clicks
$92M
loan volume a year
If leads fund atLoans / yrRevenue / yr

What waiting costs

At these rates, every month without the plan defers about $236,269 of loan revenue, or ~20 funded loans. Pages take 3–6 months to rank, so work that starts after December misses the spring 2027 buying season: ~72,000 non-branded visits a year that go to lenders who rank. In the meantime half of CMG's organic clicks go to login pages, Similarweb shows CMG's backlink count down 63% in a year (312K to 115K), and 29% of US home buyers already research brands with AI (GWI), where CMG has 58 citations (Ahrefs).

Traffic: Similarweb, US, Jun–Aug 2026 (marketing channels, search performance, website keywords, rank distribution and organic landing pages for cmghomeloans.com including subdomains; pulled 5 Oct 2026); Ahrefs, 30 Sep 2026 (organic traffic for cmghomeloans.com, cmgfi.com, guildmortgage.com and crosscountrymortgage.com; Domain Rating; AI citations). Paid spend is Similarweb's estimate; Ahrefs sees no paid keywords, so ROAST will confirm it in the account. Buyer context: GWI Core, Q1 2025–Q2 2026, US adults 21+ planning to buy a home in the next 3–6 months (licensed, with attribution). Rates: MBA, IMB production profits, Q2 2026; LocaliQ search advertising benchmarks, 2026.
Formula: (new non-branded visits + AI visits + ad budget ÷ cost per click) × visit-to-lead × lead-to-funded = funded loans a month; × 12 × revenue per funded loan = loan revenue a year. Loan volume uses MBA's $386,359 average loan. Year one: ads from month 2; pages and AI ramp over six months. Revenue is CMG's production revenue (fees and gain on sale) before loan-officer pay and production costs; it is not a borrower rate, fee or savings figure. Every revenue figure uses placeholder rates until CMG shares its own.
Part of the ROAST × CMG Home Loans search, paid media and AI visibility analysis, October 2026. Companion to the Industrious Membership-Value Calculator and the Hawkeye Inspection-Value Calculator.