All right. Great. Well, let's get started.
All right. We're on the clock.
Yeah. Good morning. Thanks, everyone, for joining. It's my pleasure to host the CFO of GoDaddy, Mark McCaffrey, and Christie, Head of IR. Thanks so much for joining us.
Yes. Thanks for having us.
Mark, GoDaddy is one of those rare internet brands that almost everyone knows. At the same time, the business today is much broader than internet domains. Before we dive into the details, how would you frame where GoDaddy is today, and what are the top priorities, especially in an increasingly agentic internet?
Yeah. A couple things, right? I think everybody knows us. GoDaddy was the domain company or I should say, is a domain company. We created it many years ago, and over a number of years, we've evolved. Where we are today, when you hear us talk about GoDaddy, you're going to hear us talk about becoming the operating system for the entrepreneur, the micro-business. We want to give them the tools that allow them to create value in whatever endeavor they're going to do, whether that's transacting on the internet, whether it's just sharing content on the internet, whether it's sharing their love of life or hobby on the internet in and of itself. We want to become the tool that they go to in order to make sure that happens.
We call it the Entrepreneur's Wheel, where we have all the technology that fits the jobs they need to do, and we continue to do that. Now, I would also point out we have a very unique customer base. We are not looking for the enterprise or the developer. We focus on the entrepreneur and the micro business, the mom-and-pop shop. If you have two employees, that's probably within our sweet spot. Some may go as high as five. Some have two people working on it, and then they have their kids working on the endeavor when they come home from school at the end of the day. Think about it. It's a very unique customer base. It's something we've done very well. It's a customer base we have a right to win with, and we have been winning with this customer base for a number of years.
As we enter the agentic world, which I'm sure we're going to talk a lot about, we've created tools, Airo, and just for clarification, A-I-R-O is how it is spelled, is the new tool we put into play to help our customer base have that agentic native experience to do whatever they need to do, create whatever they need to create.
Definitely got plenty of questions on AI. Before we do that, we would love to talk a little more about the core customer base.
Yeah.
You have industry-leading growth retention. You have talked about the stickiness of the GoDaddy platform. What do you think drives that loyalty with small businesses?
Yeah. There is a number of factors where the technology. I always say you have to innovate around your customers' needs and the jobs they need to do, and you need to have that relationship with the customer. We have that relationship with the customer. We have a care organization that is built for a number of years, but focuses specifically on making sure not only if they have questions, they are getting the best value they can out of the tools in and of itself. Our care organization helps them create that full picture of everything they can do, whether it is starting with a domain name that meets their business need, whether it is helping them create the website, whether it is getting them attached to a professional email, getting them transacted.
Our care organization has allowed us to really understand those customers, those customer needs, and make sure that we stay at the forefront of that customer base.
You mentioned Airo earlier, your AI layer. That has become a much bigger part of the GoDaddy story. Could you briefly explain exactly what it is, and what have you learned so far from customers using this product? How does it help drive customer engagement?
Yeah. I challenge everybody to go and try our Airo App Builder. We launched it at the end of Q1. We couldn't be more happy, and quite frankly, I get more and more excited every time I use the Airo App Builder myself to figure out how to get some function done, whether within GoDaddy or outside of GoDaddy in my personal life. When we came into the year, we were moving into an agentic world. We had multiple products on the roadmap. We were going to do a website developer. We were going to do an app builder.
When we started to talk to our customers and started to engage with our customer base, they came back very distinctly and said, "We want all the functionality you're talking about, but we want it in one space." That's where the idea of Airo in and of itself was created to just put all the functionality and capabilities within that one spot that they can interact with. Again, the customer relationship was we tried everything with them, and they kept coming back to, we just want to interact with one platform that can get everything done. Airo, I would say, evolved from where we were two years ago. It was reborn and now has become an agentic AI experience, and our customers love it. I say that we haven't even launched Airo in our domain purchase path yet.
What we are seeing is our existing customers are switching to the Airo platform. So when they're coming up for renewals on their products, they are basically saying, "Hey, we just want to use this. This was good, but this is great. We can recreate everything that was over here, and then we can do more within that platform in and of itself. So, we're going to switch over to this." That's what you've seen happen in Q2, and that's when we call it the transformation of our customer base. We are meeting their needs and helping them convert over. Now, it does come with a little bit of, and I acknowledge it, cannibalization because people are renewing the new Airo SKU versus renewing some of the old stuff.
But that trade-off on an LTV is well worth it for us because our customers are getting so much more value. When you think about the opportunities it creates for us, not only from a verticalization path down the road, but also adding on products into one platform versus supporting products on multiple platforms, that is where the idea of becoming the full operating system for the entrepreneur starts to go.
On that point, and you kind of touched on this, are you already seeing existing customers adopt product two and three more quickly through Airo?
Yeah, we are. One of the things that we have spent quite a bit of time talking about is, Mark talked about the evolution of Airo. In its inception, it was about being that vehicle that drives discovery and engagement into the rest of the product suite, and then that turns into monetization through attach. That continues with the new version of Airo, that is the agentic operating system for micro small businesses.
Part of the reason that we have been able to find success in there is because what we are driving in that experience for customers is surfacing for them the things that give them value and showing them, "Here are all the jobs that we think that you need to do as a micro small business, and here are tools that are designed to help you execute more of those tasks." That drives more and more attach. What we have seen is that we are getting customers to that second product attach 30% faster than we were before Airo. When we look at just the second product attach overall for the entire business, more than half of our customers have a second product. But customers on Airo, 70% of them have a second product attached. This is building a better cohort of stronger, higher LTV customers for us.
Yes. Just to add, the underlying model of how we create LTV hasn't changed. When we see a customer go from one product to two product, we have 85% retention rates, which is fantastic in and of itself on average. But when we get to the second product, our retention rate goes up. When we get to a third product, we pretty much have a customer for life, and that drives the LTV. Airo kind of puts jet fuel on our ability to do that because it gets to that second, third product. You asked about the stickiness. That's the stickiness that we create when we start to fulfill the jobs to be done for our customers. It creates that flywheel of, yes, we get a product attached, that's great, but we also start to see the improvement in the retention.
Our strategy is around those customers and those high-intent customers, and those are the ones we continue to go after.
Applications and Commerce has become a bigger mix of the business, and I'm not sure investors fully appreciate what's part of that product group. How would you describe the value that you're delivering there, and why has that segment been able to grow faster than the overall business?
Yeah. It's the creation of the Entrepreneur's Wheel. Actually, it's the evolution of GoDaddy in and of itself. When you think about us and our core platform, our segment, that is the domain. That's generally the entry point of where a lot of our customers come to us. They're looking for a domain. 60% of our traffic comes organically directly to godaddy.com because people know we are the brand around where to get a domain. That is our core platform. Now, Applications and Commerce is the creation of the rest of the Entrepreneur's Wheel, where our product attach traditionally had been websites, it had been email, it had been commerce. Now it's coming within the Airo platform in and of itself. But that second product, that third product attach generally is our A&C segment. In the past, we only operated in one segment.
Our acquisition costs around the core platform in and of itself are very efficient because of our reputation in the domain. Applications and Commerce became, once you come to us and enter into our funnel, you don't have to go anywhere else to create that online presence, get an online email, and then more recently, in the last couple of years, we've created commerce where you can transact. We support the transaction with a PayFac, and we'll support this across one dashboard. Again, it's the one-stop shop where an entrepreneur doesn't have to deal with multiple applications and make sure they're all interacting and has to deal with different vendors around it. They can just look at one dashboard, whether it's online, even offline sales if you have a brick and mortar, are all tied into one system.
Great. Let's talk about AI.
All right.
Our favorite topic. One of the big questions for GoDaddy is whether AI reinforces the domain funnel or changes the way small businesses get started. As more activity moves into AI-driven workflows, how do you think about GoDaddy's role?
Yeah. AI is undeniably something that is lowering the barrier to entry into this space, which is fantastic, right? When you look at the history of time and even just the makeup of the economy writ large, it is powered by small businesses, right? Usually, the thing that keeps people away from starting their business is it feels like it is hard to do that. It feels like it is hard to get an online presence, build an audience. When our tools and capabilities help, in addition to AI itself, lower that barrier to entry and get more ideas to market, these are the customers that are coming in as micro small businesses. Those are who our customers are that we serve, that we have been talking about today.
Our tools and services not only help them name their business, but build out their business, and in the day zero things that need to happen for getting the domain and building the website, but also the day one through day infinity of running your business day to day in that agentic operating system. AI is definitely changing the landscape, and we find it as an opportunity for us to continue to engage with more ideas to market and help more small businesses thrive.
If AI makes it easier to start a business or start a new project where you might need a website, are you seeing any of that show up in demand today? How do you separate that from the normal demand trend line?
Yeah, I think that is true. The more ideas, and it manifests itself across many different points that I think a lot of people here observe. You see more domains are being registered. You see even small business starts continues to go up. These are all the types of customers that we serve, and this micro small business , like Mark talked about, these are our bread and butter. We know and understand these types of customers, and we cater to getting them started and being there in the support capability and the vector of care, right? That matters to micro small businesses who usually are not technically savvy, but they need assistance along the way. This is where GoDaddy sort of shines.
All of these external factors are showing us that more ideas are coming to market, and these are the customers that we typically serve, and this is benefiting the tailwind for GoDaddy and the opportunity for us to continue to have that durable and sustainable growth well into the future.
You've talked about Agent Name Service, ANS. There's DNS and then there's ANS.
Yep
As part of this infrastructure for agentic Internet, for investors who are less familiar with ANS, what is the problem this is trying to solve, and why is GoDaddy well-positioned to compete here?
I'll start. We're trying to prevent the Wild West of agents. Give a little background for those of you who may not have been around our story for a long time. DNS is basically the infrastructure that the Internet operates on. It's been around, it's established, it has well-known protocols. Think about it from the idea that when you go to a website, you want to know that you're going to the website you want to go to, whether it's your bank, whether it's a vendor you're working with. It's all there because the DNS infrastructure has put in place the protocols that allow you to trust that where you're going is specifically where you're going, where you're transacting as a human, is specifically where you want to transact.
It is that registered part of that.
It is that registered part of the business. Now, you think about that world and where we are entering today, where agents are going to be doing things on behalf of us, right? You think about the infrastructure needed now to take the volume of what had been human interaction now will be agentic interaction. You think about the ability to trust the agents you are dealing with and the authentication. Are they the real agents that you want to be dealing with? If your agent is talking to a bank's agent, how do you know that banking agent has been authorized to speak on behalf of the bank or transact on behalf of the bank? That is an infrastructure today that theoretically does not exist. ANS is the extension of that infrastructure. What ANS does is expand the DNS infrastructure into the agentic world.
ANS is based on the premise that the Internet will remain open to everybody. Small businesses can operate, they can have their own agents, they can be trusted in their own agents because the protocols are in place in order to make that happen. Now, ANS is not a, I would say, GoDaddy monopoly. We are not here to try to make sure that everybody comes to our infrastructure and we are owning ANS. No, ANS is open to everybody, and ANS will allow us to move into this agentic world faster, because if you are talking about building an infrastructure today that is different and not built on DNS, that is going to take a long time to figure out. DNS did not just wake up overnight and get created in and of itself.
It took the agreement years ago that the Internet was going to be open and everybody would support that open environment. As we talk about ANS today, it is the extension of this. It is basically saying let us use the existing infrastructure and build it out into the agentic world so that when agents are now working on behalf of us, we can have those agents registered, and they can be trusted.
If someone tries to duplicate or shift an agent for whatever evil purposes they may have out there are protocols within the system that will allow you to identify that may not be the agent that you thought it was, or you have an agent visiting your website that is trying to do something that you do not plan on it doing. So, that is the idea of ANS. What we are out there doing is talking about this.
We are talking to other technology companies. We are starting to get agreement from other technology companies that this is the path to go down. We will continue to talk about that. Obviously, we are in a good space because obviously we supported DNS for a number of years. Having said that, the most important thing for us is that everybody understands the protocols that need to be in place around the agentic world, everybody supports it, and the Internet remain open to everybody to transact, do whatever they need to do on.
This has been contributed to the Linux Foundation.
That is right.
It is being co-developed with companies like Cisco, Salesforce. Is there an opportunity for GoDaddy to capture economic value?
Absolutely
as part of this identity layer?
Yeah, absolutely. You brought up two different things there. You are referencing the ARD, which is the way to discover agents. Mark was talking about ANS, so the need in the marketplace to register domains to understand the provenance, or sorry, register agents and understand the provenance of agents. Then there is the discovery component, and that is what you are referencing with all those companies that we worked with. So, once they exist in the marketplace, then you need to find the right agents that you would like to interact with. The Linux Foundation is us contributing the reference implementation for this is how you would use in the Agentic Name System, this is how you would use. If somebody wanted to become a registrar, this is how you would carry out those tasks, and this is essentially the instruction manual for how this system and infrastructure works.
To your point, GoDaddy is uniquely positioned to be able to monetize it from the perspective that we obviously have a lot of experience and understanding of the DNS and the infrastructure there, and the security that that needs, and the uptime that is required for these types of things. All of that type of stuff, we are obviously experts in, right? We have been operating the DNS for 30 years, so extending that out to ANS. In time, once it becomes a standard that becomes widely adopted, then you could come to GoDaddy to register your agent and we would monetize that.
You mentioned earlier that 60% of domain demand is generated directly, and we have also talked about how these third-party search engines or LLMs are increasingly becoming part of the go-to-market motion, and you are rebuilding the API for developers and finding ways for AI systems to show up more in searches. Are you seeing any early signs or green shoots from this demand starting to translate to GoDaddy, or do you think the majority is still going to be generated from first-party demand generation?
Well, that's a traffic stat that you're referring. We get more than 60% of our traffic is direct organic traffic, and Mark McCaffrey had already mentioned that before. LLMs are obviously becoming an increasingly important way that people are interfacing with the internet, and that traffic certainly matters to us. What we have been doing is putting work streams against increasing the traffic from LLMs and increasing the sentiment of how GoDaddy shows up in there. We're particularly focused in what we're showing up for in the LLMs. We're not interested in necessarily showing up as the cheapest domain. We're not trying to attract the lowest-intent customer. We're trying to show up in ways that are, "I want to build my online business. I want to run my online business or have an operating system for it." We're really interested in building out that.
Those motions that we've been doing or those work streams have been garnering more and more traffic over time for us and better and better sentiment in the ways that we want to show up in LLMs. This is something that we're pretty excited about and continue to build to drive those outcomes. It's not dissimilar to the early days of SEO, right? Back then, the SEO was a black box of how do you show up well for that? Everyone figures it out. The algorithm changes, and you go back to the drawing board and fix it and figure out better ways to show up. That's sort of the era that we're in right now for LLMs.
Yeah, and I just want to reinforce a point that Christie made because it's an important one for us. What you show up for in the conversation on LLMs is extremely important. Our strategy is around the high-intent customer that wants to be doing something online and will attach more product and drive more LTV. We don't necessarily want to be the cheap player out there or the domain cheap player out there. How you position yourself within the LLMs is extremely important, and there are conversations you want to be in and you have to optimize for because you want that customer and, in their conversations, it's okay. It's not going to drive our LTV equation down the road. This is something that will continue to evolve. LLMs are becoming an increasingly important how traffic is developed.
We're blessed with a great brand that brings 60% of the domains to us already. We do have to continue to monitor that 40%. There are multiple different areas that generate traffic still, whether it's search, whether it's things like YouTube. Those are all important, but LLMs are becoming an increasingly larger part of that, and understanding the traffic and the dynamics around it is something we will continue to do, right?
One of the things that stood out to me about GoDaddy is the margin profile.
Oh, thank you.
Yeah. How do you decide how much to invest behind AI and Airo without compromising this margin and free cash flow profile that has made GoDaddy so attractive to investors?
We talked about this a couple of years ago, and we used the term ruthless prioritization, and it is still very much intact within our organization. We are very focused on creating value for our customers, and everything has to start and focus on what problem are we trying to solve for our customer, and can we create the technology around that job to be done by them? There are plenty of efforts if you do not have prioritization. People love to create technology or invest in stuff, but not knowing what problem they are trying to solve, we are laser-focused on that problem that needs to be solved. We also know that we are very fortunate. We are in a position of strength. We have an amazingly strong balance sheet. We generate a lot of free cash flow.
Our margin profile is very efficient, where our normalized EBITDA turns into free cash flow at a rate slightly better than one to one. These are all by design so that we can invest in innovation around our customer needs. Again, we are not trying to appease developers or enterprises. We are focused on our customer needs and fulfilling that. At the same time, we maintain our margin profile because, hey, we have improved our normalized EBITDA margins by 1,000 basis points over the last five years. This is something we do very well because we have established the protocols in place to make sure that we are getting and going into areas that have the right ROI and just not investing in things for the sake of investing. Again, I give credit to my CEO. Do not tell him I said this, but I will give him credit.
His demeanor around the customer and understanding that customer and prioritizing that customer need is amazing within our organization. As a CFO, it creates that great opportunity that when you are prioritizing in that manner and you are making decisions in that manner, that you can do it within a framework of growing your normalized EBITDA margin, expanding them, but at the same time, investing around that innovation that meets that customer needs.
It boils down to discipline, really. Just being strongly disciplined.
One of the key themes going into the conference has been around how AI changes cost structures, including companies using open versus closed source models. As you scale AI across the product and internally, how do you think about the impact on margins over time? Is AI ultimately margin accretive, dilutive, or neutral for GoDaddy?
Yeah. I will start. I am not giving any kind of forward-looking guidance today, so I just want to be clear. Our strategy around normalized EBITDA and our ability to expand that, even as our product mix will change going forward, we feel really good about that because of the efficiencies that we are gaining within our organization around the use of AI internally. A couple of years ago, when I put out there we are going to target 33% normalized EBITDA margins for 2026, which we are on track for. I talked about the tailwinds that would get us there. I talked about the simplification of our technology stack that would create efficiencies within our organization. I talked about our access to global resources, which we were putting in play because of our infrastructure.
I talked about A&C in and of itself, that the growing tailwind around a highly profitable segment was going to overall increase our margin profile within that. When I said that, I talked about those tailwinds a couple of years ago. We were not at the point of understanding the efficiencies that could be gained around deploying AI within the organization. As we sit here today, and I am coming on that last year, I really sit there and think about, hey, those tailwinds that I talked about a couple of years ago, they are still intact. They still are allowing us to become more and more profitable every day. You can layer on the efficiencies that you can see within AI. No doubt, engineering is getting more efficient.
The ability to code and launch products into the Entrepreneur's Wheel for us is becoming a lot more streamlined. Airo is an example of how we pivoted very quickly to launch something at the beginning of the year because we heard our customers speaking very loudly. Engineers were able to do that internally because of that efficiency. Care organization. Our resolution rates on our care organization are going to levels that we never thought were possible at this point. Our ability to get that efficiency around the care organization is becoming more and more, the more we use AI to help solve problems for our customers. Quite frankly, even our G&A, we are seeing AI efficiencies across people creating applications internally to do tasks that were formerly done manually. The funny part is we are actually using our Airo tool to create those applications internally as well.
The efficiencies we are getting from using our own tools in order to do that, they are showing up as we sit here today. When I think about the future, I will talk about the future as we get to our-
Investor
Investor Night, one night only, we will talk about the ability to continue this track record. When I put the 33% out there, these things did not really exist. People knew someday it would come, but I do not think anybody was anticipating that the benefit of this would start to show up in the P&L as fast as it is starting to show up today.
It allows us flexibility to continue to invest, too, in the things that drive top line and the continued innovation in our products like Airo as well. We are able, to your question, is it negative, positive, or neutral? It is sort of neutral from the perspective that it drives investment in innovation, but it also drives efficiency in our operations as well.
It sounds like you are not seeing any headwinds or near-term headwinds from token costs. Quite the opposite, actually. It seems like you are becoming more efficient.
Yeah, we are becoming more efficient, and again, we are very pragmatic, and we do things with purpose. The way we have set up our token usage with our customers is designed so we have the flexibility to understand and control the cost on one end but understand the customer dynamics of how they are going to use it and make sure that those two match up. All right. Again, having a technology stack consolidated into one infrastructure that allows you to understand the flow of the technology, not only through our own data sources, which is fairly large, as we have talked about before, but understand what LLMs can be used to complete what tasks on behalf of our customers and make sure that matches up to the pricing of the tokens they are using. We have created that dynamic knowing that we have variability on both ends.
As token cost usage, I think the growing theory is it will get more inexpensive, but we don't know as we sit here today. We have the ability to monitor how that delivers value to our customers and make sure it's aligned with what the customers are paying GoDaddy for that value. At the same time, if it shifts, we have the ability to shift in either direction. We feel good that we've set it up in a manner that we can control on both ends.
Looking forward and without providing any guidance, but when you look at the opportunities to invest, how do you think about investing organically versus doing M&A, especially as the market evolves so quickly?
Yeah. We're again, fortunate coming back to our balance sheet. We have a lot of liquidity, and quite frankly, we get a lot of inbound phone calls on stuff. Our criteria around how we look at M&A has not changed. It has to be strategic. It has to be something that is financially accretive, and it has to be something that we can consolidate and integrate into our technology stack. While there's opportunities out there, the one thing AI has created is the ability to build a lot of things on your own today. We feel very good about our ability to innovate, and all that is doing is raising to the bar to what M&A might look like or what M&A might work for us in the future.
Again, I'm It's always something where we feel fortunate we have a seat at the table, but we think our ability to look at things pragmatically and make sure that they would fit within the criteria we put there, that remains intact. That will not change for us.
It seems like AI is actually changing the M&A philosophy in a way, because products are becoming easier to build. You can do more in-house. Is that accurate?
That's right. The bar is raised, right? I think the build/buy evaluation and the ROI on those two, in and of itself, that computation remains intact, so that hasn't changed. But when you apply the efficiency of building something versus buying something in the marketplace, the inputs and outputs on that can change dramatically in this environment, and we know that. And we've seen how we've been able to launch things like Airo. We didn't hire any engineers to build Airo for us, right? We did that internally with our existing engineer group because the talent already existed within the organization to launch this stuff very quickly.
Our ability to test into market, and experiment around things, that's a culture that has existed for years for us, so we understand what works with our customers, what doesn't work, how it can be financially accretive if we were to build something versus how, buy it. And coming back to your original conversation about how do we remain focused, that's a strategy. You have to align around the strategy. I'll keep coming back to we focus on our customers. We have a unique customer base. We have a right to win with our customer base. We're not developing for anything else. We're developing for our customers and what they need, and that strategy, that has pushed us forward for 30 years, and we will continue to push that forward because we have a right to win with this customer base.
Without front-running the Investor Night coming up later this year, what do you think are going to be some of the key questions from investors at the event?
Free cash flow.
Yes. Free cash flow, free cash flow per share, that will be a big question, I am assuming. We have done great under expanding our free cash flow per share. Two years ago, we said it would be a CAGR of 20%. Now we have upped that to we will do at least 25% CAGR for the three-year period. We are on a great track record. Even though we are going through this transformation we talked about coming out of Q2, we remained and held firm that we would generate the $1.8 billion of free cash flow that we talked about at the beginning of the year before all this transformation was put into place. The question will come is, does the free cash flow per share remain our North Star? I am going to front run this a little bit.
Our North Star will not change when we get to December 1st and talk about this. Free cash flow continues to be the driver of how we make decisions and look at ROI because we have created an efficient operation that allows us to innovate around our customers and our customer needs, return capital to our shareholders, and also take advantage of our balance sheet when the market gets a little weird around stock prices.
Maybe I will sneak one more in here, which is around, what do you think is going to be the key driver of free cash flow per share? Is it going to be revenue growth, margins, share buybacks?
Yes.
Yes, and yes.
All of those are levers, right? The North Star of free cash flow per share, the three that you just described, those are three levers available to us to continue to drive that. All of those matter.
She said it very specific.
We're out of time.
That is right.
Perfect. We can leave it here. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.