My name is Katie Keyser. I'm on the software equity research team here at Morgan Stanley. Very excited to be kicking the day off, the conference off with GoDaddy. We have Christie Masoner here from the IR team, stepping in for Mark. Thanks a lot for being here.
Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me.
Awesome. A quick disclosure before we get started. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosures website at morganstanley.com/online/researchdisclosures. Awesome. A lot to dig into on the GoDaddy story here. Maybe we can start at a high level, the kind of topic that's on everyone's minds, framing the AI landscape for GoDaddy. We've heard you talk a lot about kind of evolving Airo from that generative AI experience into more of the agentic operating system for your small business customers. At the same time, right, investors somewhat worried about how AI could disrupt the traditional kind of domain web creation value chain. Maybe just how do you frame the risk versus opportunity for GoDaddy here, where you see the company kind of most uniquely positioned versus some of those disru ptive forces?
Yeah. Thanks for the question. We're really excited and really bullish about Airo.ai. As you mentioned, it's evolving that generative AI experience into a more agentic experience. What this is doing, what it's accomplishing for micro small businesses is a set of agents that are carrying out tasks on behalf of the micro small businesses. The core jobs to be done for micro small businesses remain the same. They're looking to validate their business idea. They're looking to do, you know, get the right domain, get the right website for their business. We expect that the evolution of the Internet is going to continually change as it has for the last 30 years.
We think that this tool is going to continue to go into the direction of how the, or these tools and capabilities of how the evolution of the Internet will go. We're really excited about it and the customers that are starting to use it. We're seeing a little bit more tech-savvy users that are going into it day in and day out, and we're getting really positive feedback about how it helps them get their jobs to be done that they need to do to run their micro small business. The core, like I was saying, the core goals of micro small businesses is they want to establish their identity and a digital presence. They want to get to a place where they can reach their own customers, market to their customers, sell to their customers, accept payment from those customers.
All of those core competencies are going to change, even if the tools and interfaces change along the way.
Yeah. Awesome. We'll definitely dig into those pieces as we go through the conversation. I wanted to shift to kind of Q4 results quickly. One of the key discussion points being the impact from the introduction of the promotional pricing that you guys launched. Kind of want to take it from 3 different levels. Maybe first, just kind of what the strategic rationale was, what you're seeing on the kind of cohort quality of the customers that came in through that promotion, and then a little bit on kind of the financial impacts. Maybe first, if you can just walk us through what the strategic rationale for introducing the promotional pricing was at this time, you know, just a kind of deliberate effort to expand the top of funnel, or was there any kind of competitive kind of macro dynamics that led to that decision?
Like you said, it was about widening the aperture of the customers that we can reach, and getting some of those customers that were interested more in a one-year offer. What we were able to find is, you know, Well, first, the way that we were launching it, there's three important things to understand. First, of course, is the price. We did a $4.99 offer. Second, how is that purchase path of those customers? You know, how are they being shepherded through our front of site? Third, what is the marketing might that we're putting behind, you know, these offers? At the end of the year, we turned all of these on in full force, and we got a really strong response.
What we found is that there was extraordinarily strong demand that we were reaching for this offer. You asked about the cohort quality. The cohort quality of customers that came in under this path was pretty similar to other one-year offers. What I mean by that, the five things that we measure is, first, what's the traffic coming in? What is the conversion of this traffic as it's coming in? What is the attach of the additional products that they're getting? What's the activation? Those four things are really predictive on the fifth and most important thing of renewal. What we're seeing on the cohort quality is those first four metrics are just as strong as, and almost as strong as our other one-year cohorts.
With our long history of having extremely strong customer retention and upsell capabilities, we're really excited, and we have the confidence that this cohort will perform just as well as other historical cohorts. It really was about widening that aperture to get more high-intent customers. That's what we're seeing, is that the intent is measured by the attach and attach quality, and we're seeing really strong metrics on that front.
Got it. Kind of no change to the strategic focus of that 500 ARPU kind of customer.
Exactly.
profile. Yeah.
Yeah. That high-intent customers, what we've talked about or you're calling out is customers who spend $500 or more with us continues to grow, really impressively, and we still see strength in those customers.
Got it. Then maybe a little bit on the financial impacts of the go-to-market initiative, weighed on bookings a little bit more than revenue, just based on kind of contract dynamics, but is impacting both Core and A&C. Maybe how should we think about the drag from kind of annual contract mix? Then just kind of outline why a domains-focused promotional flow is kind of spilling into the A&C side of the business.
Yeah. We're leaning on our core strengths of being the leader of domains, right? GoDaddy is the largest domain provider in the world. Leaning on that strength, we're able to put this offer out there. Like you said, it does have a bookings impact, but what's important to understand is that it does not have or it has a very marginal impact on our revenue, right? These customers, like we were just talking about, have really strong metrics of showing all of the, you know, all of the markers and signals that they will have really strong renewal. You just get the bookings at a different time at their renewal, as opposed to getting all years of the bookings at that first purchase path.
The bookings are the only thing that's really impacted right now with a slight and modest impact to revenue right now.
Got it. That's kind of why we're guiding to, you know, bookings to trail revenue in Q1.
That's right.
To kind of catch up here.
Yeah. This offer we launched at the end of 2025. We started to do some tweaking on the amount of marketing might behind it and the purchase path, you know, into January and February. You'll still see these dynamics play out in Q1.
Got it. Awesome. That's helpful. Wanted to shift to kind of the product side for a little bit. Meaningful progress being made around Airo, kind of evolving that from the agentic or the generative experience into something more agentic. I think it's 25 agents live as of Q4.
More on the way. Maybe talk us through what fundamentally changes about the customer experience with Airo.ai relative to the original Airo through kind of core GoDaddy.com. How are the two initiatives working in tandem across the company?
Sure. The original, or legacy Airo experience is about shepherding customers through all of the products and experiences that GoDaddy has to offer for micro small businesses and presenting for them a one-stop shop solution that helps them to build out their entire online presence. Airo.ai is more of the agentic experience. How can we do things on behalf of our customers in a way that is automating tasks for them and doing things for them in the background, when they're off doing other things like maybe helping their customers or, you know, restocking the shelves of their store or, you know, going out to farmers market, depending on what their products and services are. That agentic experience is really helpful for customers to be able to do a lot more automation with the things that they're trying to do.
We're really excited about it as a multi-agentic experience. It's one of the only ones, if not the only multi-agentic experience, designed for micro small businesses.
-to be able to help micro small businesses in tasks that they need to do.
Right. What are some of those key use cases that you're running with the Airo.ai agents today? Any kind of areas of the portfolio seeing the most traction kind of early on with this initiative?
Yeah. It kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier. It's helping micro small businesses, you know, validate their business idea and get the right domain, get their presence started, and helping to connect with their customers, to have conversations with their customers, and to help, you know, even things like marketing research or understanding what is the area that my small business is competing in, and what are the things that are important for me to understand about other local businesses in my area, so I can have better research about how to do things like price my own products or connect with my own customers. All of the things that micro small businesses are typically, you know, they don't have a lot of experience of running businesses.
You know, when you think about solopreneurs or people that don't have a lot of staff, you know, they don't have a lot of experience doing these things. GoDaddy, with, you know, nearly 30 years of existence, helping this micro small business, we have so much insights and so much data about how micro small businesses operate and what is the next best step that they need to be doing, and we can suggest that. By the way, when you're conversing and having these natural language interface conversations with these agents, they can detect and understand when the micro small business or the solopreneur is feeling stuck. We can have human-guided moments built in the loop automatically to jump in and say, "Looks like you're having a little bit of difficulty.
Let us jump in and help you." You can talk to GoDaddy Guides, and that's one of the core competitive strengths, of course, of GoDaddy, is that we have those capabilities to be able to, you know, jump in and really partner with micro small businesses to help shepherd them to success.
Got it. More about automating those workflows.
That, you know, they're already doing on the day-to-day. Awesome. The other interesting kind of product announcement that came out of Q4 was kind of the impending upgrade to the Websites + Marketing product. More of that melding the traditional web builder with AI-powered chat. Maybe, you know, some new customers already being opted into the experience there. Any early kind of green shoots? Any early data points you can share about how customers are receiving that experience?
Yeah. The customers that are using it, we're getting a lot of really good feedback from it, and we'll roll this out sort of slowly.
Customers are being opted in, like you mentioned. like with anything, we do a lot of experimentation and understanding, you know, what is the right path for how to introduce these types of things to existing customers. The new customers, of course, it's a little bit easier to put them down the path.
that makes sense. You can start to, at the beginning, split the traffic so that you can understand the engagement and how customers are using the products and over time get more and more customers to opt into that experience. We're pretty excited about it. This product, we were expecting to have launched it much later in the year, but the development of it happened a lot faster than we were anticipating, so we're starting to already roll this product out imminently.
Got it. I think last year there were a lot of compelling stats about Airo accelerating website attach. Maybe what are any early expectations of how Airo.ai can kind of further inflect web attach with this new kind of up-leveled Websites + Marketing product?
Yeah. Airo, like we were talking about earlier, does do that shepherding of, you know, surfacing all of the rest of the products of the GoDaddy portfolio, and that helps to drive, and we've seen results of driving higher average order size, higher attach, higher retention, and higher renewal. Airo.ai is a little bit different from the perspective that it's more of an agentic experience that is a natural language agentic experience. The customers that have been gravitating towards that, now are a little bit more tech-savvy.
They're the customers that are more interested in having those types of agentic experiences. Over time, we expect that that will continue to march forward and to drive more and more adoption. Airo.ai, the way that it's monetized is slightly different than how... You know, Airo itself, as you know, is not a SKU. It's just shepherding customers.
-into greater attach. Airo.ai is more as customers are using the products are getting surfaced with paywalls as they're advancing into the different types of things that they're trying to carry out.
To that point, right, we've kind of noted that we're not assuming any contribution from pricing and bundling related to the websites during this transition. Is 2026? Like do you think that's kind of an upside driver to 2026? Do you think you'll start to see some of that benefit flow through more materially beyond 2026? Kind of how do you think about timing when you'll see that monetization come through?
Like you said, we haven't built that into our 2026 guide, so we'll have more to share, as time goes on.
Got it. Thought I'd try. Then just shifting to A&C for a little bit, introduced the Agentic Name Service, kind of it's that foundational infrastructure layer for the open internet. I guess just broadly, what's the strategic vision for A&C in the context of your kind of broader domain, infrastructure that, you know, you guys have been doing for so many years?
Yeah. We're really excited about A&C. This is an extension of the DNS and SSL framework that helps to build verified identity into, you know, how we are using the internet. I think we can all agree that the agentic experience, you know, worldwide is going to start getting proliferated everywhere, right? There's going to be lots of agents that are gonna be roaming about the internet. It's really important, I think, for, you know, the end users of these agents to know and understand the provenance of where these agents come from. Like, is this a real or a rogue agent? A&C is intended to say, let's have an organization that says, you know, a mechanism to organize these agents to say, "This is the identity of this agent...
It is who it says it is. We're able to leverage the power of DNS, which is proven infrastructure that has been powering the internet for the last 30 years. It's a very elegant way to have instant adoption and instant ways for, you know, all of the partners that we're, you know, we're talking to, and some have already been announced, to help build out this infrastructure. We have a proof of concept out there. Everyone's pretty excited about it because everyone understands the need for organization of agents and really proving that they are who they say they are.
GoDaddy is uniquely positioned to do this because of our strength with the DNS. That being said, it is an open standard. It's not something that GoDaddy, you know, specifically owns. We're proposing this saying, "This is the right way for the internet to evolve. This is how everybody should want to have this open internet.
Right. Two follow-ups there. I guess on the monetization kind of path, comparing it to domain registration economics, maybe are there any parallels that you can help investors draw on how monetization followed the DNS adoption curve in the past, so we can think about, you know, how A&C might transpire?
It would be similar to how you're thinking about you would register your domain and renew it annually. That being said, the agents can have a one-to-many relationship. You could have many agents tied to a specific domain.
In those types of instances, you would, you know, what we would be thinking about is having maybe a tiered approach to how the pricing works. It wouldn't necessarily be the same pricing for someone who's putting hundreds of agents-
Right
in the same domain versus one that's putting one agent per domain.
Yep. An opportunity to more deeply monetize kind of angle.
That's right. Like more of like You can think of it similar to like a seat model.
Yeah
... of like something like our email, where you can have a subscription to email, but as you hire more employees, you would have more email seats...
for that subscription.
Got it. Recently announced a partnership with MuleSoft here.
characterized it as kind of a validation point of the framework. I guess what other milestones should investors be watching out for? Is it kind of more partnerships to kind of get excited about the materiality of the A&C framework?
Yeah. The adoption is obviously what we're focused on, getting widespread adoption of this technology and this protocol. Because of the simple and elegant way that this can just be turned on overnight, we think that it's really compelling, for how to get, you know, these agents, like I was talking about organized earlier. To your point, MuleSoft did announce an integration with our A&C. We think that getting more and more players to adopt this technology is the most important first step, right? We need to get widescale adoption for going forward into the future.
Awesome. On pricing and bundling, wanted to hit on that. It's been a multi-year growth driver-
... for GoDaddy, continues to be a multi-year growth driver. I guess as we look into 2026, kind of how are you seeing that strategy evolving? Maybe talk to the amount of runway you see to go back into the existing install base and kind of utilize pricing strategies. Does anything change just because of kind of how dynamic the competitive environment is? How are you thinking about pricing as a lever more broadly?
Pricing and bundling, you can think of it as more of an evergreen type of initiative. There's gonna always be opportunities for us to understand our customer base even better than we already do, and for our customers be able to bundle together a set of products that make sense for what they're trying to accomplish. These happen a lot in the renewal path as well as the when new customers are coming in too.
When we can surface for customers and understand how their usage patterns are working, what type of value they're getting from these products, you know, we can continue to offer more in different bundles, you know, year in and year out. As we, you know, think about the cohorts of customers that we're serving, we have customers that look similar to each other, and what we can do is offer the right bundle for that type of customer, which would be a different bundle for this other type of customer, and so on and so forth. Pricing and bundling continues to be a really strong initiative for the business that continues to show really good growth and pretty much one of the core engines of the growth that you see.
Got it. How does the pricing and bundling strategy converge with kind of what we were talking about earlier with paywalls via Airo.ai? Are these two pricing strategies that are existing alongside each other? Is there any risk of cannibalizing, right? Like, what you could be monetizing between the two? Just how are you thinking about those two pricing initiatives running kind of together?
Yeah. I would think of it as slightly separate from the perspective that the pricing and bundling is about surfacing for customers what is the right bundle of products that you should have in your build for what the stage or the journey that you as a micro-business are in. What are the things that you're trying to accomplish? You know, what are the different attached products that make sense for what you're trying to do? On the Airo.ai and paywalls, that's for how you're using that particular product and how you're engaging with that particular component of the product.
Awesome. Helpful. wanted to spend a couple minutes on customer count-
kind of ARPU dynamics. You know, emphasize the focus on those high-intent customers.
spending $500 annually. Pretty compelling, you know, mixed stats, now 10% of your customer base, growing low double digits in fiscal 2025. Into 2026, maybe how are you thinking about the trade-off between customer account growth and ARPU expansion? Maybe just when we think about how that mix is trending, any, you know, data points we can put around what level of mix that can ultimately inflect to in the overall customer base in the next couple years.
Yeah. Both are important, right? Having ARPU expansion and customer growth are important, neither of which that we guide to. However, we're really focused on getting customers first and foremost, getting those high-intent customers and getting them to areas in which, you know, we can drive better attach of the things that they're getting in their bundle. The reason we focus so much on this is because we have so much data that shows us that when customers are in a second product, their retention is significantly higher than our already strong 85% customer retention. When we get customers into that third product, you know, they're near perfect retention. When we talk about that $500 line of demarcation, it's sort of a demonstration of showing this customer likely has two to three products with GoDaddy.
This is showing you that these are really strong, near perfect customer retention, and that's why we drive, you know, that, you know, that $500 customer, or that's why we talk a lot about it, I should say, because it is a demonstration of our efforts working with getting that higher attach, that higher intent customer. That kind of talks a little bit about both the growth and the ARPU expansion there.
Right. I think that's the debate, right? Like, if the retention, the ARPU is so strong, do you really need to be so focused on the actual customer count number? Obviously, right, we would benefit from having just that broader pool of customers to drive to those higher value cohorts. I guess, like, coming back to the promotional activity-
Like, how does that play into what you're thinking about customer count? Should that be driving positive customer count growth in 2026? Just kind of how do you balance that tension between customer quality and then kind of needing that growing top of funnel?
I think it's really important to call out that the low price for that offer does not mean low intent.
Intent is measured, like I was talking about earlier, by attach. That $4.99 offer was showing extraordinarily strong attach that was almost as good as every other one-year cohort that we've ever had. We have a demonstrated track record of not just being able to cross-sell into additional products with our customer base, but also have those customers renew. When we did this offer, what it does is it broadens the aperture for the customers that we can get. Not every customer is interested in having three years as their starting point. A lot of customers are interested in having a one-year as a starting point. We're perfectly happy with, you know, broadening the aperture to get those that are interested in one year.
those that are interested.
Yep.
-in three-year offers. I don't know that they're in as direct conflict as, you know, what the question might suggest. I think that it's additive. It's not an or, it's an and.
Right. Got it. That makes sense. Just broadening that funnel.
The only thing I'll add to that too is we did see a lot of, you know, really strong take for that offer, right?
We did see, You know, we started at the end of the year, but even going into the beginning of the year, we're seeing such strong adoption or strong, take of that offer that, you know, it's kind of to that point of, yeah, the new customers are coming in to take on that offer, so.
Right. Got it. wanted to kind of run through the two revenue segments quickly and kind of see how you're thinking about those into 2026. I mean, A&C has definitely been the growth baton growing kind of in that mid-teens range. You're guiding to low double digits for next year. I guess we've kind of heard that there's a number of drivers that aren't being embedded within the guide, whether it's Airo.ai cohort monetization-
pricing and bundling around the new Websites + Marketing product. I guess kind of what are those key growth drivers that you're thinking about for A&C into 2026? If there's anything you can kind of give texture around the bookings trajectories, just because kind of comps are less of a big deal than they have been in the past. Anything on kind of A&C growth trajectory would be great.
yes. Importantly, we do have pricing and bundling on A&C, just not on that one product.
Right. Exactly.
There is various other products.
that exist within A&C that are subject to pricing and bundling.
Yes.
We have an offer out there for, Managed WordPress for hosting that is doing really well, and various other ones too for, our email and productivity offering as well.
It's just not for that specific case.
Yep.
-of Websites + Marketing, that helps to drive it. Of course, Airo itself as being the shepherd of getting customers to that second product, third product, and that's typically, A&C is usually the highest beneficiary of that Airo shepherding customers through those additional product suite. We're pretty excited about the... Obviously A&C is that high margin part of our business that continues to grow quite nicely. You know, it helps customers have more of that fulsome one-stop-shop experience. With, again, when you think about the micro-small business and the tools and services that they need to have that one-stop shop, it's a very compelling value proposition for them to have a single dashboard to manage all of these things. A&C is usually the products where they're getting everything else on top of that.
We're pretty bullish about A&C. We're pretty excited about the forward trajectory for it.
Awesome. Then in the Core Platform, kind of growing or guiding for a little bit of a slowdown from 25 to 26. There's a number of dynamics at play, though, right? We have expiration of the .co contract, not really embedding aftermarket in there just based on the volatility of that business and then some of the impacts from the promotional pricing that we talked about at the top. I guess is low single-digit growth, is that the right way to kind of structurally think about the Core Platform, or is this more of a kind of one-off year just because of some of those headwinds?
Well, we've been guiding to low single digits for Core Platform for a very long time. It's been outperforming.
Right.
We have. The biggest outperformer you called out was aftermarket. When we think about aftermarket, we have been guiding to low single digits. The large part of aftermarket, which by the way, is a validation of the strength of the domains and the value of that asset in and of itself. You know, when we think about, you know, aftermarket grew 12% last year, and we expect it to be low single digits, that is 9 points of outperformance.
Yeah.
9-10 points of outperformance for aftermarket. That is a tough thing to grow on top of. We don't have that built into the guide. I think it's important to understand and acknowledge, we do expect that large aftermarket deals are going to happen.
We just don't put them into our guide because of the volatility, like you mentioned. There's also the .co expiration that you talked about too. We ended that contract in October of last year, we still have about 50 basis points of headwind from the expiration of being the registry for .co. We are still the registrar for .co.
Yeah.
That part of the business remains intact.
Perfect. Moving to margins for a little bit before we open it up for questions. The pace of margin expansion has been very impressive, right? I think 1,000 basis points over the past 5 years, 32% in 2025, and you're guiding for 2026 to kind of exceed that Investor Day target of 33%. Maybe first you can kind of outline the key initiatives that have gotten you there. Where do you find the most kind of OpEx leverage? How does mix play into it? Talk a little bit about the journey.
Thank you for noticing. You're right, 1,000 basis points of margin expansion is no small feat, and we've been very successful there. The top three areas that have gotten that margin expansion for us is infrastructure simplification. We did a lot of work in the last 2 years to get our platform onto a single place where we can have sort of all of the data and all of the platform in an area where we can leverage our data a lot better, leverage our offerings to customers a lot easier. The second one is from having the access to global talent. We're able to, you know, even with the power of having a strengthened platform, and the power of AI, we can give better insights to new employees as they're coming into the business.
It helps us to leverage, you know, talent in other areas.
It doesn't have to necessarily be U.S.-based. Then the third, like you mentioned, it's the product mix, the A&C tailwind. A&C is growing a lot faster than core, which has the lower margin.
The segment margin for A&C is just significantly higher than Core Platform.
Yeah.
All three of those, you know, play into what we have enjoyed as really strong margin expansion and what we expect to continue to enjoy. We're, like you said, we've guided to 33% for our Investor Day target two years ago. We're on pace to exceed that, you know, for this year.
Yeah. I think that gets at kind of the follow-up question, right? How much room is left to go on margins just because what you've achieved thus far? When you look forward, like, does anything change about your approach, or is it kind of continuing to drive forward that similar playbook?
Yeah, that plus operational efficiency.
There is, you know, efficiency and leverage to be found in AI, but we'll tell you more about beyond 26 when we get there.
Awesome. Any questions in the room before I keep going? All righty. Can you say anything competitive?
Excuse me. Nothing specific to call out. I think that, you know, when we think about who our customers are, those micro small businesses, and the core competencies that they need. The competitive advantages that GoDaddy enjoys is having the strongest brand awareness in the space, so that drives a lot of traffic to the GoDaddy.com website. We have over 60% of traffic that is direct navigation to GoDaddy. That is really strong of having that powerful brand. Having the scale that GoDaddy has enables us to operate efficiently globally, you know, all over the world. The third competitive advantage is the products that we have that are seamlessly built to have that one-stop shop that micro small businesses need.
I think not to be underappreciated, of course, is the care model that GoDaddy has so that we can partner with our customers to help. That keeps that retention and renewal really strong. By the way, care drives 9% of our bookings, which on a $5.4 billion business, 9% of bookings is really powerful. You know, the competitive landscape in the internet space has always been intense, right? Everybody is competing, you know, in the internet space. There isn't anything to call out specifically of really different about the competitive landscape. It's always been a really intense competitive environment.
How relevant is brand awareness?
I think it's extraordinarily strong. Like I was just mentioning that. The question, in case it didn't get caught on mic, is how important is the brand in an agentic world? Because micro small businesses know GoDaddy is the place to go to get online, and especially if I wanna be, you know, running a micro small business and have a partner that powers, you know, all of the things that I need to do, customers start out with going to GoDaddy.com directly. You know, we get more than 60% of our traffic because micro small businesses know GoDaddy is the place to go. Brand is extraordinarily important. We are a B2B business, but we operate as B2C, and our end user in micro small businesses needs our tools and capability. Brand awareness is extraordinarily important.
Yeah. Hi. Thanks. Maybe just a couple of questions. Maybe could you contextualize kind of the rate at which you're attaching websites onto your customers and how that's kinda been changing as you put out new products? Secondly, I think you mentioned, you know, when you've used Airo.ai, a lot of the customers are the more tech-savvy customers so far. How do you think about the marketing strategy to bring that such that more customers are comfortable with understanding what the product is and driving that attach as well? Thank you.
Sure. The way we've talked about attach is the amount of our customer base that has more than one product with us. Greater than 50% of our customers have at least a second product with us, which is pretty remarkable when you think about GoDaddy having a scale of over 20 million customers. And that number continues to go up. On top of that, the velocity of getting customers to that second product attach has been going up. Your customers are getting to that second product 30% faster. To your question about Airo.ai and how do you market that's a constantly evolving engine and something that we're extraordinarily experienced in almost 30 years of operating in this business and on the internet.
The ways in which we reach out to customers, of course, all the traditional ways that you would expect for new customers, right? You're doing, you know, things like YouTube, you're doing direct marketing channels, direct targeting, that type of stuff. There is also, like, over-the-top type of advertising that you do for, you know, even, like, TV advertisement. Existing customers, it's different. The motion is different because you have direct conversations with those customers. When we have the relationship that GoDaddy has with micro small businesses, that helps to drive even to the earlier point of when we said that, care is driving 9% of bookings. Those are happening through empathetic conversations that we have with existing customers that drives additional cross-sell and attach.
The marketing and the way that we get these other products in front of existing customers happens through those types of channels as well.
Awesome. If I could just squeeze in one more.
Sure.
on capital allocation.
Yes.
You guys have been heavy deployers of the buyback. Should we expect that to continue going forward? Has anything changed about kind of your view on M&A just because there's kind of also some dislocation in external assets as well?
You're bringing up a really important point. GoDaddy has an extraordinarily strong balance sheet, and we have a lot of opportunities because of the strong cash generation that we have, that we have a lot of options, and we get asked a lot about being at the table for M&A. Our criteria for M&A is the same, right? It needs to strategically fit, it needs to financially make sense, and it needs to be something that we can integrate into the platform. We have done a lot of work with simplifying our tech stack and, you know, having any sort of acquisition that would be difficult to integrate would be not preferred, right?
By the way, we continue to drive so much innovation and launching more and different products internally that too raises the bar for what makes sense strategically for us to purchase. That said, you're right. We have been really strong deployers of share buybacks. In fact, in 2025, 100% of our free cash flow was deployed through cash. Sorry, through stock buybacks. I think that probably we'll end on, you know, our strategy is the same.
Awesome. That brings us to our time. Thanks so much, Christie.
Yeah.
Appreciate it.
Thanks for having me. Mark sends his apologies. He got very sick last night, so I'm filling in on a pinch. Thank you for your grace.