GoDaddy - Earnings Call - Q2 2025

Executive Summary

• Q2 2025 delivered solid top-line growth and stronger profitability: revenue $1.22B (+8% Y/Y), operating margin 21.9% (+340 bps Y/Y) and NEBITDA margin 31.3% (+180 bps Y/Y).
• GoDaddy raised FY 2025 free cash flow guidance to approximately $1.6B and lifted FY revenue guide to $4.89–$4.94B; Q3 revenue guided to $1.22–$1.24B and Q3 NEBITDA margin ~32%.
• Wall Street consensus was modestly beaten: revenue $1.218B vs $1.207B estimate*, EPS $1.90 vs $1.34 estimate*; non-GAAP strength and favorable mix were key drivers (S&P Global).
• Management highlighted acceleration in AI initiatives (Ask Airo, Agentic AI), continued wins in pricing/bundling, and reaffirmed the “North Star” focus on maximizing free cash flow.
• Stock reaction catalysts: raised FCF outlook, continued margin expansion, A&C momentum (+14% Y/Y), and Agentic AI narrative; note a ~50 bps headwind in Q4 from exiting .CO registry operations.

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

What Went Well

• Strong A&C growth and margins: A&C revenue up 14% Y/Y to $463.9M; segment EBITDA margin 44.4% (+90 bps).
• Profitability expansion: operating income $266.3M (+28% Y/Y, 21.9% margin) and NEBITDA $381.7M (+15% Y/Y, 31.3% margin), supported by favorable product mix and disciplined execution.
• Clear AI roadmap: CEO emphasized “transformative potential of agentic AI” and new “Ask Airo” conversational/agentic experience to complete multi-step tasks for customers.

What Went Wrong

• Customer count declined modestly: total customers 20,409 (−2.2% Y/Y), reflecting ongoing strategic cohort focus and prior divestitures; ARPU increased to $230 (+9.5% Y/Y).
• Q3/Q4 domain registry transition: exit as .CO registry service provider to create ~50 bps bookings/revenue headwind concentrated in Q4 2025.
• Tax and comparability noise: prior-year periods had non-routine tax benefits impacting net income comparability (e.g., 2024 six-month tax benefit $267.4M; 2025 six-month uncertain tax position benefit $34.6M).

Transcript

Speaker 0

Welcome to GoDaddy's second quarter 2025 earnings call. Thank you for joining us. I'm Christie Masoner, VP of Investor Relations, and with me today are Aman Bhutani, Chief Executive Officer, and Mark McCaffrey, Chief Financial Officer. Following prepared remarks, we will open up the call for your questions. If you'd like to ask a question on today's call, please use the raise hand feature in the webinar to be added to the queue. On today's call, we'll be referencing both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures and other operating and business metrics. A discussion of why we use non-GAAP financial measures and reconciliations of our non-GAAP financial measures to their GAAP equivalents may be found in the presentation posted to our Investor Relations site at investors.godaddy.net or in today's earnings release on our Form 8-K furnished with the SEC. Growth rates represent year-over-year comparisons unless otherwise noted.

The matters we'll be discussing today include forward-looking statements, such as those related to future financial results, and our strategies or objectives with respect to future operations. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that are discussed in detail in our periodic SEC filings. Actual results may differ materially from those contained in forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today, August 7, 2025, and except to the extent required by law, we undertake no obligation to update these statements because of new information or future events. With that, I'm happy to introduce Aman.

Speaker 3

Good afternoon, and thank you all for joining us today. At GoDaddy, our mission is to empower entrepreneurs and make opportunity more inclusive for all. We draw inspiration from the ingenuity of our customers, who are the people building businesses, chasing dreams, and positively impacting their communities. As our small business survey consistently shows, they are a resilient group and remain optimistic about their own businesses, even when navigating increased complexity. That's why we are committed to delivering the critical technology they need, combined with the human guidance that is empathetic, accessible, and grounded in their success. It is this combination that helps our customers thrive and grow with confidence. In the second quarter, our disciplined execution delivered strong results, reflecting the power of our strategy of attracting and retaining high-intent customers who generate high lifetime value for GoDaddy.

ANC bookings grew 12% against the toughest comparison for the year, and normalized EBITDA margin expanded nearly 200 basis points, reflecting the operating leverage in our model. We made strong progress towards GoDaddy's financial North Star of maximizing free cash flow with growth of 21%. Reflecting that momentum, we are raising our full-year 2025 free cash flow guidance to approximately $1.6 billion. As a leader in bringing AI to micro businesses, we are energized by the transformative potential that agentic AI is unlocking for Aero and our customers. This is more than an evolution, it is a leap forward. This quarter, we began testing a new conversational experience that lays the foundation for something truly groundbreaking: an agent that can intelligently complete complex, multi-step tasks for our customers, freeing them to focus on what matters most: building their dreams.

Imagine a world where entrepreneurs can ask Aero anything across the full spectrum of our offering and receive instant contextual support, seamlessly connected to our expert guides when they need a human touch. Brought to the customer experience as Ask Aero, its goal is to be a fully guided and proactive digital experience powered by agentic AI and elevated by empathetic care. The short video you saw at the start of this call offers just a glimpse into the future we are building for our customers. Behind the scenes, our operations are undergoing a fundamental shift powered by AI. Across the company, employees are embracing AI and agentic tools to accelerate velocity of execution. In one recent example, two interns leveraged our internal agentic platform to build an agent that autonomously diagnoses anomalies in experiments, reducing a process that once took days to just minutes.

From engineering to accounting, AI and agentic AI are reshaping how work gets done by transforming roles, unlocking efficiency, and enabling our teams to focus on higher impact outcomes. We can't wait to bring all of this to life for you as well. We look forward to sharing a deeper look at Aero's agentic capabilities at our investor dinner later this year. What we are building is exciting, and we are off to a great start. As always, I also want to share a bit more about our growth initiatives, starting with pricing and bundling. With half the year behind us, we feel confident that this initiative is on track and delivering across both ANC and core platform for 2025. At the same time, we are actively executing against our 2026 roadmap, testing and scaling new offerings that represent the next phase of this multi-year journey.

These new bundles are based on new partnership capabilities, and the early results have been promising. Pricing and bundling are starting to benefit from our increased code writing velocity using AI. As an example, we recently concluded a test integrating a new partner product into GoDaddy's technology stack over a matter of weeks rather than months. Remarkably, nearly 100% of the code was generated by AI and guided by a Senior Engineer. This was work that would typically have required a small team for a few months. While the exploration of AI-driven coding is ongoing across many use cases, this example demonstrates the transformative potential of AI-driven coding in pricing and bundling. Scaling this type of result across our teams would create a step function change in velocity, enabling us to test new bundles at a pace many times faster than today.

Our next major initiative is Seamless Experience, an ongoing large-scale experimentation machine designed to enhance the entire customer journey, from landing page and initial search all the way through to purchase and renewal. It is focused on improving discovery and reducing friction, saving our customers time and effort. Through this initiative, we boosted conversion rates, strengthened attach, and drove better renewal performance, outcomes that at our scale translate into meaningful financial impact now and in the future. The bookings generated from Seamless Experience have scaled in an impressive manner, and this initiative has an equally strong roadmap as pricing and bundling, and its impact and contribution are becoming increasingly comparable. Turning to our commerce initiative, we surpassed a significant milestone, reaching more than $3 billion in annualized gross payments volume on continued strong conversion of our existing base of customers, a clear signal that our strategy is resonating.

Equally exciting, our focus on delivering powerful high-value tools is gaining traction. Our newly launched Rate Saver, a credit card surcharging feature that can reduce effective rates for merchants by more than 50%, is demonstrating promising early momentum with attach rates climbing. Last but never least, Aero discovery and engagement continue to grow, and we expect it to increasingly shape and monetize our future customer cohorts, and our strongest cohorts are ahead of us. Notably, Aero cohorts consistently outperform non-Aero cohorts across key metrics, including average order size, multi-product attach rates, and renewals, serving as a catalyst for the growth in higher lifetime value customers. These gains are compounding, creating long-term leverage in our model. We are deeply focused on Aero's continued evolution into a true differentiator that accelerates customer success and drives sustained value across the entire GoDaddy ecosystem.

In closing, we are proud of the progress we made in the second quarter as we push our strategy forward, making meaningful progress towards our three-year targets outlined at our investor day in 2024. Our results reflect the impact of disciplined execution and the growing traction behind our priorities of expanding high-intent customers, capturing more wallet share, and driving greater lifetime value. As we enter the second half, our teams are focused, our path forward is clear, and our business is well-positioned to accelerate the pace of innovation that delivers long-term value to our customers and shareholders. With that, here's Mark.

Speaker 1

Thanks, Aman. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Q2 was another strong quarter for GoDaddy Inc., underscoring the resilience of our customers and the mission-critical solutions that differentiate us in the market. We delivered ANC revenue growth of 14%, expanded normalized EBITDA margins to 31%, and we grew free cash flow to $392 million. Our consistent performance reinforces the strength of our strategy and the discipline of our execution as we progress toward our North Star of maximizing free cash flow over the long term. Total revenue grew 8% to $1.2 billion on both a reported and constant currency basis, surpassing the high end of our guided range. Annual recurring revenue grew 9% to $4.2 billion, and international revenue grew 11%. For our high-margin ANC segment, we drove 14% growth in revenue to $464 million, in line with our guided range.

ANC is now approaching an annualized run rate of approximately $2 billion, nearly doubling over the past four years on the ongoing adoption of our subscription solutions. ANC revenue now accounts for 38% of total revenue, which is an all-time high, up from 36% at the same time last year. Segment EBITDA margin expanded nearly 100 basis points to 44%. Our core platform segment delivered revenue growth of 5% to $754 million, exceeding our guide. These results were driven by growth in primary domains, up 7%, of both units and pricing and bundling initiatives, alongside continued momentum in aftermarket, which also grew 7%. Segment EBITDA margin expanded by over 200 basis points to 33%. Moving to profitability, normalized EBITDA grew 15% to $382 million, delivering an expanded margin of 31%, up nearly 200 basis points and in line with our guide for the quarter.

The expansion was driven by sustained operational discipline with leverage gains reflected across our P&L. Total bookings grew 7% on a reported and constant currency basis to $1.3 billion against the toughest comparer of the year. Within that, ANC bookings grew 12% and core platform bookings grew 3%. As a reminder, bookings primarily represent cash collected during the period. Importantly, free cash flow grew an impressive 21% to $392 million, reinforcing the strengthening of our customer cohorts and the increasing conversion of normalized EBITDA to free cash flow at a ratio that is now greater than one to one. Our go-to-market strategy is focused on attracting high-intent customers who adopt multiple products and generate high lifetime value. Over the past year, cohorts that spend over $500 annually grew meaningfully, and that momentum carried through into Q2.

This group now represents nearly 9% of our total base, and Aero is playing a pivotal role in its evolution by intelligently guiding their journey. These customers are expanding average order size and fueling GoDaddy's impressive total ARPU growth, up 10% to $230. What's more, this cohort demonstrates near perfect retention. The combination of rising ARPU and exceptional retention clearly illustrates the durable pathway we build toward a growing base of sticky, higher lifetime value customers. On total customers, we have largely moved beyond the impacts of eliminating deep discounts and divestitures. That said, we continue to see some residual pressure from migrations as they move through their initial renewal cycles. Excluding this remaining headwind, customer count has grown in each of the last two months. As these pressures subside and we benefit from strong conversion of higher intent cohorts, we expect a return to customer growth later this year.

This momentum underscores the effectiveness of our strategy and the long-term value creation embedded in our integrated platform. On the balance sheet, we exited the quarter with $1.1 billion in cash and total liquidity of $2.1 billion. Net debt was $2.8 billion, representing a net leverage of 1.6 times on a trailing 12-month basis. Year to date, through August 6th, we have repurchased approximately $900 million of our outstanding shares. Our commitment to a disciplined capital allocation framework is unchanged, and share buybacks remain a key mechanism to return value to our shareholders. As of the end of the quarter, our fully diluted shares outstanding was 142 million.

Looking ahead, I am pleased to share that given the strength of our performance year to date, our increasing profitability to cash flow conversion, and the proven durability of our business model, we are raising our full-year free cash flow target to approximately $1.6 billion, representing growth of over 18%. Additionally, we are raising our full-year 2025 revenue outlook that we provided in February. We now expect total revenue to be in the range of $4.89 to $4.94 billion, representing growth of 7% at the midpoint. For the full year, we expect FX neutral bookings growth to be in line with revenue growth. For Q3 specifically, we are targeting total revenue of $1.22 to $1.24 billion, also representing 7% growth at the midpoint of the range.

Within total revenue, for both Q3 and the full year, we expect Applications and Commerce revenue growth in the mid-teens and core platform growth in the low single digits. Regarding our outlook, I want to mention that beginning in the fourth quarter of this year, GoDaddy Inc. will no longer operate as the registry service provider for the .co top-level domain. As a result of this change, we anticipate an approximate 50 basis point headwind to bookings and revenue, primarily in the fourth quarter. Importantly, this transition does not affect our ability to execute our strategic initiatives or deliver on our 2025 and 2026 financial commitments. For the third quarter, we are projecting a normalized EBITDA margin of approximately 32%, and we are reaffirming our full-year margin expansion target of 100 basis points, with continued sequential expansion each quarter this year, exiting 2025 at 33%.

We expect normalized EBITDA to maintain greater than a one-to-one conversion to free cash flow for the full year. Our capital allocation approach remains unchanged, and we will continue to evaluate all opportunities according to our rigorous returns-based framework to maximize long-term shareholder value. In closing, we remain more confident than ever in the strength of our model and our ability to execute toward our targets. Our second quarter results reflect GoDaddy Inc.'s solid foundation, powered by disciplined operations, consistent innovation, and the growing impact of our strategic initiatives. From enhancing and expanding AI-powered experiences and solutions like Aero to attracting higher value customers, we are driving sustainable and profitable growth across the business. With nearly 30 years of consistent growth through a variety of macroeconomic backdrops, GoDaddy Inc. is built for durability and long-term value creation.

That strength is anchored by a high-quality recurring revenue base, disciplined cost management, robust free cash flow generation, and a strong balance sheet. Looking ahead, we are fully committed to delivering on our investor day targets of $4.5 billion plus in cumulative free cash flow generation, 6% to 8% annual revenue growth, and expansion of our full-year normalized EBITDA margin to 33% by 2026. With our continued momentum, we remain excited about our path forward. With that, I'll hand it back to Christie to open up the line for questions. Thank you.

Speaker 0

Thanks, Mark. As a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, please use the raise hand feature at the bottom of the webinar screen to be added to the queue. Our first question comes from the line of Willow Miller on for Arjun Bhatia at William Blair. Willow, please go ahead.

Hi, team. Thanks for taking our questions. Maybe we can start with the Applications and Commerce (ANC) growth. How should we think about the deceleration in the quarter? Does this continue through 2025? Just trying to figure out if there's a trough, considering the Aero strategy is layering in, which would help drive average order size and attach rates in the segment. Maybe just a follow-up. What are you seeing in the latest cohort of customers who experience Aero? Is this helping with the multi-product adoption?

Speaker 1

Yeah, thanks, Willow. No trough, right? We are happy about the momentum of ANC. Overall, as a business, we think that the bookings and revenue will be on par for the year, absent any impact of FX. ANC now is at a run rate of about $2 billion for bookings and revenue. We're really proud of the momentum there, and it's a growing business. It's at 38% of our total business today, and we're looking at it growing to about 40%. We couldn't be more excited about the momentum within ANC. It was a tough quarter to compare, considering the growth last year in ANC was upward of 24%.

Speaker 3

Maybe I'll expand, Willow, that the comps do get easier in the second half of the year for ANC growth. You can keep that in mind.

Yep, that's helpful. Thank you.

Speaker 1

I also want to add a question on the cohorts related to Aero. We're seeing these cohorts, they're coming in, they're converting at higher rates, their average order size is being driven up, it's driving our increase in ARPU, and we have a near perfect retention rate with them. This strategy is working. We're getting to those high-intent customers, and we're really pleased with the momentum it's providing in the business, not only in Applications and Commerce (ANC), but also in our core platform.

Speaker 3

Yeah, on the customers that are sort of over $500 customers, that's where Mark's talking about the near perfect retention, but that's being driven by the attach that Aero facilitates. I think you talk about it's a driving attach, is a driving average order size. We continue to see Aero cohorts outperform non-Aero cohorts every month.

That's great to hear. Thank you.

Thank you.

Speaker 0

Our next question comes from the line of Josh Beck from Raymond James. Josh, please go ahead.

Speaker 1

Thank you for taking the question. I have a higher level question, probably for Aman, but when we think about the agentic web and this kind of potential new front end, how do you think about kind of making sure that the website ecosystem and app ecosystem remains relevant? I think in some ways, investors want to make it a little bit cut and dry, like it's either the agentic web or something else, but just kind of, you know, just big picture, a high level, like, you know, how do you see this affecting the way that, you know, consumers are gathering information and what does this mean for GoDaddy?

Speaker 3

Thank you, Josh. I think I'm a huge proponent and very bullish on AI, generative AI, and agentic AI as well. I think these new capabilities give companies like ours that have access to over 20 million customers, brand awareness across the world, the ability to provide a whole set of products to our customers, but woven together in a manner that's simpler for them to use, more simple than they have ever, ever seen before. We have been a leader and innovator in the AI space for micro businesses from the very beginning. I personally am super involved with, and I have been for years at the company with how we work with AI and now how we work with agentic AI and how it's transforming our customer experience.

You'll see that with Ask Aero, if you were able to catch that little video at the beginning of this call. We're bringing forward a new interaction pattern for Aero, which just makes it even more easy or seamless, or you can say conversational with the customer. We're even working to bring in sort of AI and human expertise together so it's seamless between the two. For me, when I think about GoDaddy, there are two areas of opportunity. One is what we can do for our customers, which is make things much, much easier for them, which leads to attaching more products, which leads to us being able to expose them to higher SKUs and so on. Also internally, the company is transforming where every role in the company is empowered with AI and those roles evolve and change.

For now, there's a lot of exploration and utilization of AI and agentic is growing. As those two curves cross, I think what you're going to see is a step function opportunity for companies like ours to be more efficient and provide great products to our customers. We'll actually show you some of this at the investor dinner later this year. I'm super excited to sort of bring it all to life.

Speaker 1

It's super, super exciting. Wanted to also ask just on the pricing kind of learning curve from Aero All Access and certainly the Aero Plus logo maker. You've seemingly done a lot of testing. Do you feel like you've kind of got that at a point where this is somewhat of a stable pricing pattern moving forward? Is it still in heavy experimentation? Just kind of curious on the learnings and how that's influencing where the pricing can go.

Speaker 3

You saw us test All Access, but you've also seen different forms of Aero Plus. If you're watching the different experiments on the site, it's still all very, very early. There are some paths where we're having great success in introducing Aero Plus and customers intuitively understand it and go for it. On other paths, what we're finding is more education is required, sort of more easing into the path is required. Aero Plus is still very new, just launched in Q1. You'll continue to see us testing it. Overall, we're very excited about where Aero is in terms of creating a higher average order size through attach, where it's getting engagement into multiple products with us, how it's helping us reach that higher-end customer and filling a broader set of intents for them. We can see that naturally leads to Aero Plus over time.

Yes, continue to be super excited about that.

Speaker 1

Super helpful. Thanks, team.

Speaker 3

Thank you.

Speaker 0

Our next question comes from the line of Trevor Young from Barclays. Trevor, please go ahead.

Great, thanks. First one for me. On the .co registry change, I appreciate the color sizing that for us. Is there a change here in thinking on whether you want to be a registry versus a registrar, or is this just a one-off related to that specific country code? Mark, on the 3Q EBITDA margin and full-year margin unchanged, it implies diminished margin improvement in the back half versus about two points in the front half. Are there some cost layering in here that we need to be mindful of or some mix differential or anything like that? Bridging that to the raised free cash flow guide, is there something working capital-wise that we need to be mindful of? I think I heard you say that you're now expecting greater than one-to-one EBITDA to free cash flow conversion. Just hoping you can unpack that. Thank you.

Speaker 1

All right, no problem. Trevor, no change in our philosophy. This was a one-off situation where we went out to rebid, and the profitability metrics that were needed to continue in this relationship just weren't there for us. I would say it's more on the strategy of our profitable growth and making sure we stay disciplined to our framework versus a change in philosophy. On the diminished margin expansion, nothing really to call out here. We are doing well, we're expanding sequentially quarterly, we're on target for a 33% exit. Our comparisons for the margins last year in the second half are a little harder than they were in the first half. There's nothing to call out expense-wise. On the free cash flow, it's being driven by our strong bookings and the cohorts coming in.

Remember, bookings is the beginning of our free cash flow, the top line of our free cash flow, and we're seeing a lot of strength at the top of that funnel related to the cohorts we're bringing in. They're coming in at higher average order size, better retention, and that's helping us on our free cash flow. Positive momentum in the business and operations is the driver. Nothing to really call out on working capital or unique expenses in the second half.

Speaker 0

Great, thank you, Mark.

Our next question comes from the line of Vikram Kesavavola from Baird. Vikram, please go ahead.

Hey, can you hear me okay?

Yep.

Yep, hey, Vikram.

Okay, great. Hey, thanks for taking the questions. My first one is on Ask Aero. I appreciated the video that you shared at the top of the call and all the commentary around the opportunity from agentic tools. I'm just wondering if you could talk more about how you're thinking about the timeline for bringing these solutions to market across your customer base, and just what some of the initial feedback has been from the tests that you've been running so far. My second question is on the customer count. I appreciate all the color on some of the underlying trends there. On a headline basis, I think you said you still expect to return to growth later this year.

I'm wondering if you can put a finer point on the timeline there, if that's going to happen in the third quarter or the fourth quarter, and what you're seeing at the top of the funnel or other signs that give you confidence that you'll return to growth this year. I'll leave it there. Thanks.

Speaker 3

Thanks, Vikram. Let me start with Ask Aero. Ask Aero is actually already being tested on a few pages on the site. What happens is we replace that little button at the bottom where customers can ask questions with Ask Aero. Initial tests have shown that customers actually like clicking on that button. It attracts their attention, and it opens up a modal and a conversational experience for them where they can do a few things. Now, having this initial success where the user interaction pattern seems good and is tested, we're going to layer in more and more agentic capabilities into Ask Aero over the next quarter. It is very much right in front of us over the next few months. The idea is to keep bringing in more and more capabilities as we see what customers are exploring and what sort of works well.

I think folks probably understand this. The AI capabilities, they're not deterministic. It's a probabilistic modeling work. You have to test it. You have to see that the customer is getting a fantastic interaction, and then you sort of roll it out and handle more and more use cases. The thing I would say about Ask Aero is we are talking about a real set of agents that actually find and resolve issues or do sales or all of that on the customer's behalf. We're not talking about an agent that says, oh, if you want to do this, you can find it here. We're talking about very, very real AI agentic technology that really simplifies it for our customer.

Speaker 1

Yeah, Vikram, on the customer count, our strategy is around going after these high-intent customers and we're seeing improved customer count around those that are spending more than $500 with us. This cohort is having meaningful contribution to our growth. We're seeing that, like we said, the higher average order size, near perfect retention. It's working exactly the way we want it to, if not a little ahead of schedule. On the total customer count, yes, we are seeing some tail-off effect of the migrations as we get through the renewal cycle. A reminder, these are mostly one-product customers. A lot of time, they're low-cost domains. We expect to see it through the rest of the year. We're seeing positive signals in the last couple of months, but nothing to call out on the exact timing of when we'll say it's positive.

Again, our focus is on that high-intent customer that's going to spend more than $500 with us.

Okay, great. Thank you.

Speaker 0

Our next question is from the line of Ken Wong from Oppenheimer. Ken, please go ahead.

Fantastic. Thanks for taking my question. I guess my question is kind of merging Vikram and Josh a little bit. This is probably less of a headwind for you guys versus your peers, but are you guys seeing any change in terms of the top of funnel? Are you seeing any change in share shift in terms of potentially AI, vibe coding tools? Maybe it's taking some share on kind of your web presence products. Any color there would be great, Aman.

Speaker 3

Yeah, look, I'm super excited about AI and agentic capabilities making it easier for customers, whether that's to find domains or build websites or any of the features that we talk about. The main point I would make is, one, we're not seeing any direct sort of issue. Our strategy is to attract a high-intent customer. We're seeing strong top of the funnel. We're seeing better sort of year-over-year conversion of those customers, and we're seeing higher attach, higher average order size. That's what the metrics are saying. If I want to look forward the next year or next two years, maybe the context that I would share is that I've been involved deeply into this within our teams for many years now. The things that are possible today, a year ago, I don't think we would have thought possible.

If we're looking at things today and saying, hey, XYZ is now made, that's not, in my mind, that's not the case at all. We're at the beginning of this new way of working, which is going to be powered by AI, and there's going to be a lot of movements over the next two to three years as the AI capability improves, as it scales, as it gets put into every piece of how we work. To me, that's a massive opportunity. Are multiple companies going to use it? Absolutely. GoDaddy has fantastic brand awareness globally. We have a big customer base. We have a lot of customers coming to us, new customers coming to us every year, and we have the opportunity to both build these tools ourselves because of how our technology capability or software development platform has improved.

We also have the ability to use our balance sheet and financial collation if we want to really provide the best for our customers. That's, I think, a great opportunity for the company.

Got it. Understood. Appreciate the insights there. Maybe somewhat building on that, I guess, do you feel the value or having the starting point at the domain, does that strategic value increase going forward? Maybe a little high level and maybe a little far out, but I'm sure something you guys have noodled on internally.

You know, we love our position as the world's largest domain registrar. We love our position that the world thinks of GoDaddy to think of domain names. Because every idea, when people have the idea, the first thing they think about is, oh my God, let me protect the name of that idea. They do that by buying a domain name. That gives us access to those customers when their ideas start. In fact, we see so many ideas that never start because customers search for things. They may not even become our customers, but we are gathering that data all the time. Given our large scale, we get to see search traffic or what people are searching more than probably anybody else. Our core model of starting with the domain name, making that funnel stronger, has been a tremendous advantage for the last 28, 30 years.

As we look forward, it's only becoming stronger because we've taken the domain name and we work to reinvent it to say when you start with the domain name with Aero, you're going to get all these other things too. You're not just starting with the domain name, you're starting almost with sort of a set of things that start your business, almost like a business in a box, just with a domain name.

Fantastic. Thanks a lot, guys.

Thank you.

Speaker 0

Our next question comes from the line of Samuel Kemp from Citi. Samuel, please go ahead.

Hey, good afternoon, guys. Thanks for seeing my questions. Maybe one, just on Aero and conversion and monetization updates. You know, when you first rolled out Aero, kind of the big feature was creating the initial landing page when you register for a domain and the expectation that that landing page over time turns into more. It sounds like you're making progress there, $500 customers, but are you seeing better conversion? Those landing pages turn into real sites and more products being attached. Can you just update us on that flow and how that's been trending?

Speaker 3

Yes, Eagle, you know, the percentage of customers that end up in a paid website product with us that patch for that more and more over the last year has become through Aero. Actually, for a few quarters, we shared that data, but now it's just sort of gotten up and up and up. Customers come in, they start with a domain name, we build them the one-page site, a good percentage of customers take that, they love it, and that makes it easier for us to upsell the paid website. More and more that paid website is driven by AI, where the whole site is just created for the customer, which basically disrupts this whole idea that customers come in and they have to build a website using an editor and a template. It's more about, no, you've got the domain name.

From that name, we have done a good job of understanding what your idea is about. We give you seven, eight options. If you pick one of those options that tells us very clearly what it is that you're in, then now we have a one-page site, but we can take all of that information and, of course, the information we have from many other customers and turn that into a paid product, a paid website for you. That's the path we're going down, and it's just more and more customers end up with a paid product going through the Aero path.

Speaker 0

Yeah, and just taking a step up, right? If you think about volume for us being stronger retention rates, better attach, new customers coming in and buying and converting higher, that is doing really, really well for us. The other side of the equation is the pricing and bundling, giving more value and getting price for it. If you look at those as the two drivers, the price element plus the volume element, they are contributing equally now to our growth. That puts us in a really good spot going forward. Pricing for value, but yet also getting the stronger attach retention and new customers coming in and converting at a higher rate.

Great, that kind of segues into my second question, Mark. On pricing and bundling, and you know, you just kind of shifted from a product to a cohort lens. How's that going? You know, any learnings or maybe on the trajectory of pricing and bundling and the opportunity going forward? Thanks.

Speaker 3

Yeah, the shift to taking the customer cohort has been fantastic. We have approached it from the customer lens, and the biggest impact that, or the biggest thing that's opened up for us is we're able to look at the full relationship with the customer and really help our renewal rates overall because we want to help our customers succeed, and we don't want to take price if that's going to lead them to depart. We want to help them along. We want to get them the tools that will make them successful. Once they are successful, of course, we participate in their success, and that's what the value-based offer does for them.

Speaker 0

I know you have more to go. I'm jumping in. The great part about this cohort is that we're seeing it now contribute to both Applications and Commerce (ANC) and core platform, and we saw some of that growth start to show up in the domain element to go to the core platform because we were bundling the domain with certain things. Those cohorts are really starting to work, and I know we're talking, we're thinking about next year already.

Speaker 3

Yeah, exactly. What I was going to add is that both for pricing and bundling and seamless experience, we feel very good about the roadmap in front of us because right now we are testing the bundles that are going to go live in Q4 this year or Q1 of next year that are going to be the pricing and bundling initiative for next year. We go into this through a lens of experimentation with a lot of confidence. The same is true for seamless experience where it is a program that is literally based on thousands of tests that get run that improve the customer experience at many, many, many nodes, allowing us to test very different experiences. We are getting better and better at that.

That's something I called out in my prepared remarks that if you look at the return coming from these programs, both of these programs are starting to contribute sort of in a similar manner and have great roadmaps in front of us.

Speaker 0

Great. Thank you, guys.

Speaker 3

Thank you all.

Speaker 0

Our next question comes from the line of Brad Eriksen from RBC. Brad, please go ahead.

Hi guys, thanks. Maybe I'll just follow on to that last one. I think security was a pretty big driver for you on the pricing and bundling last year. I guess as you're doing all these tests and you talk about the Q4 launch, any way to think about kind of sizing the magnitude of impact that it had because I think it showed up in the P&L fairly well from the security side. Just how to think about that as you roll these products out over the next 12-18 months.

Speaker 3

Yeah, probably turn the mic a little bit, but my guess is it's a little early to talk about what the specific bundles would be for 2026. As we've evolved this capability, we're a little careful about how much detail we probably talk about the specific bundles because they can tend to be quite unique to cohorts of customers. I think we'll talk about 2026 when we get to it.

Speaker 0

Yeah, we're going to talk about 2026, but coming back to the commentary I made before, when we look out at the contribution across our cohorts, how much is being driven by the volume element and the improvement and the attach and convert versus how much is being driven by pricing and bundling and that value element of it. The fact that they're now starting to even themselves out gives you a pretty good idea that we have a good model here that's starting to contribute, and it's based on the balance between the two.

Got it. Thanks.

Speaker 3

Thank you.

Speaker 0

Our next question comes from the line of Alex Levine on for Mark Zagudowicz from Benchmark. Alex, please go ahead.

Hi guys, thanks for taking the questions. First, nice acceleration on ARPU sequentially. I was hoping you could qualify uptake from the marketing suite or Aero Plus that may have contributed to that.

Speaker 3

You know, the marketing suite and Aero Plus are still pretty new products. While we're very happy with the attach that's happening with these products and we continue to put them in front of more and more customers, overall, they're still a small part. I don't know, Mark, if you want to.

Speaker 0

Yeah, and you know, I'll just talk about Aero in and of itself. We couldn't be more happy at how the strategy is working and what we're seeing at the top of the funnel, the increased convert, and the ability to get to the average order size and the near perfect retention that we're getting from that cohort that is coming in. You know, Aero Plus, you know, that is still in the early stage and things like that will contribute to Aero overall. Right now, we're just seeing the experience driving that strong behavior at the top of the funnel. We see steady traffic, higher convert, better attach, and higher average order size. That's because the Aero experience is taking our customers on that journey of what they need much faster, much better. That cohort is becoming very strong in our customer base right now.

It's reached 9% or about 9%, and we continue to see that contributing more and more to our overall growth.

Got it. Thank you. That's helpful. One last one on a high-picture question. As you think about agentic and the opportunity that this may catalyze in an upmarket push for you guys, perhaps something like an MCP, broader integrations there, just curious if you could elaborate on that and perhaps some of the milestones we should expect over the next 12 months in terms of agentic monetization.

Speaker 3

Yeah, I think over the next 12 months, you can expect to see a GoDaddy that is completely enabled for agentic AI, where Ask Aero uses agent-to-agent technology or MCP or other evolving technology that, you know, if you're asking me about these, I'm sure you know there are new standards coming out sort of every few weeks. We expect to keep pace with them. We expect to be able to enable the GoDaddy platform for our customers and for our partners in a very significant way using agentic AI.

Very helpful. Thank you, guys.

Thank you.

Speaker 0

Our next question comes from the line of Navid Khan from B. Riley. Navid, please go ahead.

Speaker 3

Hi, can you hear me?

Speaker 0

We can.

Hey, Navid.

Speaker 3

Great. Maybe just on the commentary you had around the Rate Saver that delivers up to 50% savings. Just wondering how sustainable is that promo? What kind of economics we can expect out of that? Any color would be helpful. Then on Aero, how much of the flow at the top of the funnel is exposed to Aero today? I think some time back you mentioned more than half the people see it, but any update on that would be great. Thank you. Yeah, happy to provide that, Navid. On the Rate Saver product, the way it works is that when the merchants adopt it, they're able to reduce their fees they pay by about half. There really isn't, I would say, a threshold. It's not a promo that we're offering. It's actually a product feature that helps them reduce their cost.

We expect its adoption to grow in the new cohorts where we put it forward. In the new sales, customers are adopting it very, very fast, but they can understand it. They're like, that makes sense. I need that. I want that. That's fantastic. In the existing base that we have, we're also running a campaign to get existing customers, commerce customers, to turn it on. This is all part of a broader strategy at GoDaddy Inc. to improve the economics, to improve the SaaS component of our commerce and payments offering. Of course, we've continued to do well on GPV, but we have put our energy toward the SaaS products so we can have a more wholesome offering for our customers. Our core strategy is still the same. We are enjoying the low CAC to go to our own customers. We continue to have fantastic leads.

We know our strategy is working and we're slowly expanding our sales force to be able to go after more and more customers that are in our base already, as we have a bigger set of features that go across both payments, but also the SaaS offering. In terms of Aero, practically all customers are now new customers, especially on the top of the funnel, are starting to see Aero in Aero. When Mark talks about the Aero and non-Aero cohorts, he's very much talking about those customers coming in and being exposed to Aero. It's become more nuanced. Customers now have more choices on how they use Aero.

That's only developing well because we're able to better segment customers that maybe just want to buy a domain because they want to add it to their portfolio and don't want Aero, but others that want Aero, and hence we're able to push them through a different path and get more engagement across more products. In terms of the rollout, you can expect Aero to override things in a short period of time. Basically, every customer is going to be able to see Aero. We'll continue to work on how deeply they engage, and we'll continue to work on things like Ask Aero, where they engage in a different way in a conversational style, and that will work, we think, differently for existing customers as an example.

Speaker 0

Yeah, there's no doubt that now that all our customers at the top of the funnel are exposed to Aero, it is helping grow that customer base that is spending more than $500 with us because it is getting them to that attach, that average order size that's higher. It's having a real meaningful impact on our model, and that continues to be a bigger part of our customer base.

Speaker 3

Thank you.

Thank you, Navid.

Speaker 0

Our next question comes from the line of Elizabeth Porter from Morgan Stanley. Elizabeth, please go ahead.

Great, thank you so much. I have another AI question, but maybe from a bit of a different angle. We're often hearing about how it's harder for businesses to get their website found as SEO becomes more challenging. Just kind of two questions here. First, how is GoDaddy managing its own impact by SEO? I know you guys have a big brand recognition, so it might not be as impactful, but just curious how diversified is traffic? Any changes that you're making to the marketing strategy? Second, what's the opportunity for GoDaddy to help its customers navigate this new world, whether it's by specific products or services that you guys can capitalize on? Thank you.

Speaker 3

Yeah, of course, you know, GoDaddy is a large brand, and we do quite well in SEO, and we're engaged in the work to get sort of the similar capability with the AI LLMs as well. All of that makes sense. Of course, you know, everyone can see that Google has evolved and, you know, the search traffic is evolving. So far, GoDaddy has been able to compensate for those changes given our strategy and our approach. We have continued to diversify our channels and how we bring customers to us. We've continued to improve the efficiency of how we reach customers and how we have improved our conversion rates. All of those, you know, offsets for us and any changes that happen today.

We fundamentally believe that given our position, that as the world evolves, we will have an opportunity to be a leader in the new space as well. That's where we're focused. In terms of our customers, you know, one of the products we're most excited about, and we teased it just a little bit in that video early on in this call, is the ability for our customers to have an agent actually do SEO optimization and other optimizations on their website on a continuous basis. We see internal projects that are doing things like that. We have a pretty interesting experiment running that does it completely autonomously and measures completely autonomously. These are sort of new technologies, you know, using agentic AI, and we think we'll be able to bring those to bear for our customers.

For the customer, the interaction is going to be probably as simple as asking Aero, where Ask Aero prompts them and says, "Hey, I could help you with this," and the customer basically just has to say yes and sign up for it, and then the agent is able to do the rest.

Great, and then maybe just a quick follow-up on the Ask Aero. The surface area of what you can go after in supporting small businesses is very significant. As you think about the expansion of capabilities, are there certain areas or workflows that you are highly focused on kind of near term? Are there any other areas that could be surprising to investors that you could start to address? Are there any areas that are really just kind of out of the scope of what you guys are trying to look to with this product?

Yeah, the customer jobs to be done that we're very focused on are the entrepreneurs wheel, which we have talked about many times. What agentic AI does is, and the technology transformation we're going internally for AI, is that it allows us to bring all our capabilities together in a very conversational experience for our customers. The second piece, which I also talked about briefly in the prepared remarks, is that what we're seeing is the integrations we do with our partners. Agentic coding or coding done with AI is a very good use case for it for various reasons. As we scale that, that's where I think the surprise and delight element is going to come from, where GoDaddy Inc. is going to likely be able to bring in more partners faster and be able to test them much faster and bring those experiences to our customers.

We think that area is going to phenomenally evolve over the next, I want to say six, I don't even want to say 12 months. I think in the next six months, we'll probably see a lot of changes and you'll see partners on the site that do different things. Of course, we'll talk about it with you. We'll talk about it on these earnings calls and talk about where we see the best results.

Great, looking forward to it. Thank you.

Thank you, Elizabeth.

Speaker 0

Our next question comes from the line of John Bayon from Jefferies. John, please go ahead. I think we might have lost John. That was the last question. Over to you, Aman. Never mind, he came back. John, go ahead.

Speaker 3

Can you hear me okay?

Speaker 0

Yeah.

Speaker 3

Okay, yeah, just hit the wrong button. Thank you very much. It's John again for BrandTail. The question is actually on the core platform. It looked like you've seen maybe some renewed relative strength there, you know, especially with domains, even the primary, not just the aftermarket being up. I would say, mid to high single digit. Wondering, is that something that can be sustainable as you kind of alluded to Aero helping there? On the .co registry, the impact of 50 basis point, should we assume that continues through part of next year as well?

Speaker 0

A couple of things. I'll start with the core platform. We're seeing the benefit of a pickup in the aftermarket. No doubt we saw activity in some of the larger transactions return in the first half of the year. We're also seeing the benefit of the positive impact of pricing and bundling within domains. We talked about it at the beginning of the year. We're starting to see that flow through. I would say it's sustainable. Pricing and bundling in and of itself, we'll continue to look and test into it. We're really happy with the momentum and the added lift, not only it's giving to our volume in domains, but also our ability to get value from those domain sales in and of itself. Increasing the top of the funnel and that conversion part of it is really, really working.

On .co, to a lesser extent, we'll see an outsized impact. The whole thing is immaterial in and of itself, but we wanted to call it out for the fourth quarter. It'll be a very small impact into next year and doesn't change our ability to meet what we put out there as milestones for 2026.

Speaker 3

Thank you.

Speaker 0

I'll now turn the call over to Aman to close us out.

Speaker 3

Thank you, Christie, and thank you all for joining us. As always, a fantastic thank you to all GoDaddy team members across the world. We're super excited about the products we're building, the customers we have, and you know the best is still in front of us. Thank you very much.