GoDaddy Inc. (GoDaddy) is a global leader serving a large market of entrepreneurs, developing and delivering easy-to-use solutions as a one-stop shop provider, alongside personalized guidance.
The company serves small businesses, individuals, organizations, developers, designers, and domain investors. The company’s 20.5 million customers are passionate and determined to transform their ideas into something meaningful. The company’s ability to evolve and build products to meet the company’s cust...
GoDaddy Inc. (GoDaddy) is a global leader serving a large market of entrepreneurs, developing and delivering easy-to-use solutions as a one-stop shop provider, alongside personalized guidance.
The company serves small businesses, individuals, organizations, developers, designers, and domain investors. The company’s 20.5 million customers are passionate and determined to transform their ideas into something meaningful. The company’s ability to evolve and build products to meet the company’s customers' needs uniquely positions the company to help the company’s customers navigate their journey as small business owners.
The company’s customers' journeys tend to be non-linear, and each phase can be iterative in nature. The company designs its solutions to help across all aspects of the customers’ businesses and to assist them in improving and growing across what is called the ‘Entrepreneur's Wheel.’ The Entrepreneur's Wheel represents the customers' needs within three key focus areas: Identity, Presence, and Commerce.
The company’s customers often start with the most intimate of brand considerations, their Identity, which includes the company name, domain name, logo, and email address. The domain name continues to be an important initial step for customers as they start and grow their businesses. The company provides products to support their brand through its domain services that blend seamlessly into their connected social identities and online presence. In addition, with the help of GoDaddy Airo (Airo), entrepreneurs can more easily establish their identity through AI-powered domain name searches and logo creation.
The company also helps its customers manage and grow their Presence while connecting with their customers through its expanded service offerings and access to relevant third-party products and platforms. It offers a suite of Presence-based solutions, most of which are enhanced by Airo, including website building and hosting, marketplace syndication, social media, search engine visibility, security, business products, and email and other services.
Finally, the company has built a suite of Commerce solutions that enable its customers to sell directly online, in-person, and across multiple channels, such as marketplaces and social platforms, and to integrate dynamic information everywhere they engage with customers. These solutions include GoDaddy Payments, point-of-sale systems that unify transaction management for both in-person and online sales, and an inventory and order dashboard for easier management of the company’s customers' businesses.
At GoDaddy, the company’s customers should have both great technology and great support at every point on the Entrepreneur's Wheel. With AI-powered experiences such as Airo and customer centric assistance such as the company’s GoDaddy Guides, it can provide intelligent, proactive experiences within the company’s GoDaddy solutions. For example, Airo can help small businesses build and grow with domain searches, logo and image creation, website and social media posts, ad design and email marketing campaigns. In addition, the company helps set its customers up for success with personalized guidance from the company’s GoDaddy Guides via phone and digital experiences, thousands of daily conversations and the company’s gathering of valuable feedback to enable the company to continually evolve its products and solutions and respond to the company’s customers' changing needs.
Customers and Solutions
GoDaddy is built to serve the needs of customers by providing easy-to-use products on an integrated technology platform wrapped with personalized guidance.
Customers
The company serves several customer populations: Independents, WebPros, Domain Investors, Domain Registrars, Third Party Registrars, and Corporate Domain Portfolio owners. While these customer populations tend to utilize many of the same GoDaddy product offerings, there are meaningful differences in their journeys, what they value, their goals, and how they communicate with their customers. The company intends to establish and provide solutions that address these differences.
The company’s largest customer population, Independents, mostly consists of microbusinesses and non-commercial endeavors. Microbusiness owners have an entrepreneurial spirit, strong work ethic, and, above all, passion for their ideas, yet their specific needs vary depending on the type of their idea and the phase of their journey. Independents range from individuals who have an initial business idea and those thinking about starting a business, to established ventures that need help attracting customers, growing their sales, processing payments, managing their online presence, or expanding their operations. Most Independents have fewer than five employees, and most self-identify as having little to no technology or design skills. These customers need the company’s help to create a unique and secure identity, especially with the more technical aspects of their online presence. Although the customers have differing degrees of resources and technical capabilities, they all share a desire to find tools to help them bring their ideas to life, enhance connections with their audience, sell their products and services, and provide a seamless experience for both existing and new customers.
The company’s second largest customer population, WebPros, are website designers and developers who build websites on behalf of businesses and non-commercial organizations. The company estimates that half of all global website builds occur through a third party, such as its WebPros, on a do-it-for-you basis. WebPros are often freelancers, moonlighters, or teams within website design agencies that often have website design as one of multiple streams of income. WebPros generally have more technical acumen and look for tools that provide greater amounts of flexibility, such as the WordPress content management system (CMS). Although WebPros have a need for technical depth and flexibility, they also benefit from the company's simplicity and guidance as tools to increase their throughput and maximize the use of their time. The company helps its WebPros customers in a number of ways beyond its product suite and services, including providing tools to help them save time, make money, and exceed client expectations. These client management applications aim to make it easier for WebPros to manage their clients' websites at any host, or on GoDaddy products, such as Managed WordPress. The solutions are built to assist WebPros in more easily managing their overall business with capabilities, such as client billing, administrative access, and shopping features, making it easier for them to buy and manage multiple products for their clients, as well as make use of enhanced technical support and discounts for reselling GoDaddy products. The company supports a variety of third-party control panels and content management tools favored by WebPros, including cPanel, Plesk, Drupal, Joomla, and more.
The company’s third largest customer population is Domain Investors. Domain Investors are individuals or organizations who manage a portfolio of registered domains for the purpose of selling via secondary markets. These investors bring a unique and valuable resource to the company in the form of liquidity and the ability to help its other populations (Independents and WebPros) successfully find a domain name they prefer.
The company also serves Domain Registrars, Third Party Registrars, and Corporate Domain Portfolio owners. Domain Registrars are organizations that have their own domain registration offerings, but who use the company's domain registration and management platform. These commercial arrangements provide for strategic relationships with many key platforms and enable further scale of the company's domain registration technology and insights. Third-party registrars are served through GoDaddy Registry, which provides wholesale generic top-level domains (gTLDs) and country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) for registrars to sell to the end customer. These top-level domains (TLDs) provide alternatives to the .com domain that more closely represent the names of the customers' ideas, businesses, and brands. For registry operators, the company provides a fully managed registry platform, including managing the full registry technology and operating stack at scale, with approximately 180 TLDs, including some global brands. The company also serves corporate domain portfolio owners, which are organizations that maintain and manage a large portfolio of domain names, including general and international domains. These customers are looking for the most powerful, secure, and intuitive technology to streamline their processes, unparalleled industry experience and expertise to navigate the complexities of managing a corporate portfolio, and a focused and dedicated team.
Solutions and Experiences
The company designed and developed an extensive set of easy-to-use technology solutions and seamless experiences to enable its customers' journeys along the Entrepreneur's Wheel across multiple platforms and online marketplaces. It understands that no matter what the customers' needs are, or what stage of their idea they are focusing on, the customers want a ‘one-stop-shop’ solution. The company offers its customers products and services to meet them at every stage of their journey.
The company’s domain name registration products enable the company to engage customers at a common starting place for establishing an exclusive, uniquely branded identity and are often an on-ramp for its other products. Domains are a part of the company's Core Platform business. Applications and Commerce products, including the company's proprietary website building and commerce products, as well as its productivity solutions, significantly improve the company's value proposition to customers, thereby improving its financial performance, growth opportunities, and customer retention.
In addition, the company has built customer experiences that provide its solutions in a seamless one-stop-shop environment. Airo helps small businesses establish an online presence and grow through AI-powered tools that assist customers with domain searches, logo and image creation, website and social media posts, ad design, and email marketing campaigns. And, the company's GoDaddy Guides are readily available and provide care to customers who have different levels of technical sophistication.
The company manages and reports its business in the following two segments:
Applications and Commerce (A&C), which primarily consists of sales of products containing proprietary software, notably its website building products, as well as its proprietary commerce solutions and third-party email and productivity solutions and sales of certain products when they are included in bundled offerings of its proprietary software products.
Core Platform (Core), which primarily consists of sales of domain registrations and renewals, aftermarket domain sales, domain protection, website hosting products, and website security products when not included in bundled offerings of its proprietary software products, as well as sales of products not containing a software component.
Applications and Commerce
Bringing an idea to life online, establishing and maintaining a presence, and continuing to grow requires the right tools and products. Website building solutions, e-commerce tools, digital marketing capabilities, and other GoDaddy solutions are designed to help the customers start, grow, and scale their presence and ultimately their businesses. The customers come to GoDaddy to build a professional website, attract customers, sell their products and services, and accept payments online and in person by engaging with its easy-to-use tools, managed in one place.
Applications Products
Primary applications products include:
Websites + Marketing: Websites + Marketing is an easy-to-use, do-it-yourself, mobile-optimized online tool that enables the customers to build effective websites and e-commerce-enabled online stores with minimal technical skill. The company offers a variety of plans, with pricing dependent on business and marketing features. With each of these plans, customers gain access to industry-targeted professional design templates, which can be further customized using the company’s editor by adding intent-driven sections, photos, videos or text. The company’s design templates cover a wide range of categories, with professionally written content for small businesses, organizations, families, weddings, and other ideas. The company designs its websites and tools to work seamlessly on mobile devices, with a focus on performance, to enable websites to appear in search engine rankings.
Managed WordPress and Managed WooCommerce Stores: Managed WordPress is the company's streamlined, optimized website building experience that allows the customers to easily build and manage a faster WordPress site that offers more flexibility and power than the Websites + Marketing solution. With its Managed WordPress site, the company manages the administrative tasks for the customers, allowing them to spend more time on building or growing their business. The company offers a variety of plans, with pricing based on various features. The company's Managed WordPress sites are built with automatic, regular backups and core updates, enhanced security, integrated Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), one-click migration tools, pre-installed extensions, plugins and themes, business email and backups and a staging site. The company also offers Managed WooCommerce Stores, giving its customers the freedom to sell anything, anywhere online, from physical products to digital downloads, services, and subscriptions.
Digital Marketing: The company offers a range of marketing tools and services designed to help businesses acquire and engage customers and create content. These capabilities are available in an integrated offering with its website and commerce tools, or as a stand-alone offering for customers using other website content-management systems. For example, Airo, an AI-powered experience, allows the customers to quickly create a powerful marketing campaign, including recommended, customized social media posts, better site traffic with the Airo SEO wizard, a step-by-step guide to optimizing each website page with suggested keywords and descriptions, and a Customer Insights dashboard that provides insights on site traffic, sales, and orders, and digital marketing. The mobile application, GoDaddy Studio, helps the customers to grow their brands by easily creating impactful visual content for almost any online platform. Search Engine Optimization helps the customers get their websites found on major search sites using a simple step-by-step wizard with targeted recommendations on which search phrases are most likely to drive traffic to a customer's site. Business listings capabilities bring business information to where customers are looking, including Meta and Google My Business. Email marketing lets the customers build targeted campaigns, either from scratch or using website or commerce content. Social Media Marketing helps the customers create ads and boost brand awareness through a complete ‘do-it-for-me’ service for managing engagement on the most popular social networks. This service combines dedicated teams of branding experts – photographers, writers, designers, marketers – with proprietary technology to manage activity on Meta, X, and Yelp, among others, to help the customers acquire new customers and build stronger relationships with their existing customers.
Commerce
The company designs its commerce products to help the customers sell online, in person, and on leading marketplaces, while being able to manage their sales from one place. In addition to robust commerce capabilities, the company offers the lowest card transaction fees in the industry when compared to similar plans from other providers, which allows the customers to keep more of what they make.
Primary commerce products and services include:
Online Store: The Websites + Marketing product includes online store capabilities, which allow the customers to transact business directly on their websites. Online store capability is easy to use and offers powerful commerce features with templates for websites that are optimized for mobile shopping, integrations with GoDaddy Payments and its Smart Terminal Point-of-Sale (POS) system, inventory and product catalog management, and growth tools for marketing. It also allows customers to sell on marketplaces, such as Amazon, Etsy, eBay, Walmart, and Google, and social media platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, with all channels managed from the centralized dashboard. As part of the GoDaddy Commerce ecosystem, Managed WooCommerce Stores, the WordPress-based online store solutions, provide the customers with everything they need to sell online, in person, and across popular marketplaces and social media platforms from one built-in experience. Similar to the Websites + Marketing product, Managed WooCommerce Stores include the centralized dashboard, allow for marketplace selling, and are integrated with GoDaddy Payments and its Smart Terminal POS system.
Point-of-Sale (POS) Systems: The company offers a line of smart POS terminals for businesses with in-store operations, including its flagship countertop, Smart Terminal, and its compact Smart Terminal Flex. The Smart Terminal devices are modern, dual-screen all-in-one POS systems that allow the customers to manage in-store inventory and product catalogs and accept payments. In addition, the Smart Terminal line seamlessly integrates with both the Websites + Marketing Online Store and Managed WooCommerce Stores to unify in-person and online sales so businesses can offer ‘Buy online pick up in-store’ experiences to their customers. The Smart Terminal line also offers access to third-party applications that meet merchants' needs that the company does not address directly.
In addition to the Smart Terminal line of POS systems, the company offers payment acceptance solutions that allow the customers to accept payments their way while seamlessly interacting with their customers. For example, it includes Payable Domains, a default payments system that is designed to create a frictionless, out-of-the-box experience for the customers. The Card Reader and Tap-to-Pay on the GoDaddy Mobile App (iPhone and Android) allow the customers to accept payments and sell on the go. The Virtual Terminal allows the customers to accept payments from their smartphone, tablet, or computer with Internet connection with no hardware needed. The customers also have the ability to accept online payments without needing to create a website through its Online Pay Links.
GoDaddy Payments: As a ‘payment facilitator,’ GoDaddy Payments enables the customers in both the U.S. and Canada to accept all major forms of payment, including Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, and contactless payments, including Apple Pay and Google Pay, with no long-term contracts or monthly minimums. This service enables the customers to start accepting payments in minutes with a simple setup and get paid, in many cases, as early as the next business day, all with the lowest fees in the industry when compared to similar plans from other providers. In addition, GoDaddy Payments is built-in as a payment’s acceptance method in all the U.S. and Canada commerce products for easy enablement.
Email and Productivity Solutions
The company’s customers want to spend their time on what matters most to them, selling their products and services, or helping their customers do the same. The company provides them with productivity tools, such as domain-specific email, telephony, and online storage to help run their ventures. It offers a variety of products designed to make the business of business easier for the customers. The products it offers include those developed in-house, as well as third-party applications that it distributes and supports, such as Microsoft 365.
Primary email and productivity solutions products include:
Email Accounts: The company offers a range of email service plans with a multi-feature web interface that connects to the customers' domains. The pricing of these plans depends on the customers' desire for additional features, including HIPAA-compliant email, advanced email security, archiving, and additional business applications, such as Microsoft Teams. All the email accounts are ad-free, and the company offers added security functionality designed to protect against spam, viruses, and other forms of online fraud, such as phishing.
Microsoft 365: The company offers fully-supported Microsoft 365 accounts that are easy to set up and use with the customers' domains. It offers Microsoft 365 through multiple plans, ranging from email with calendar and contacts connected to a full suite of productivity tools, including file sharing and full desktop versions of Microsoft productivity applications, such as Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. For customers wanting to protect their email data, the company provides an email backup service, and for customers needing to comply with regulatory requirements, it provides email add-on services, such as HIPAA-enabled email, encryption services (in partnership with ProofPoint), archiving services (in partnership with Barracuda), and advanced email security. The company helps make Microsoft 365 and Microsoft 365 Copilot installation easy, allowing the customers to be up and running in minutes, including ‘do-it-for-me’ migration services to move the customers' existing email data to Microsoft 365 accounts.
Core Platform
Domains
Every great idea needs a great name, and GoDaddy is a domain naming service. Staking a claim on an identity with a domain name is an integral part of establishing a concept and presence online. When inspiration strikes, the company provides its customers with the broadest selection of domains and high-quality search, discovery, and recommendation tools to help them find the right name for their idea. Securing a domain is a key component to creating a complete identity, and the company's domain products often serve as the starting point in its customer relationships. The company is a global player in domain name registration, with approximately 81 million domains under management as of December 31, 2024. Based on information reported in VeriSign's most recent Domain Name Industry Brief, this represented approximately 22% of the approximately 362 million domain names registered worldwide as of December 31, 2024. As of December 31, 2024, approximately 93% of the customers purchased a domain from the company. In addition, GoDaddy Registry provides a high-performance back-end registry technology platform with a portfolio of TLDs, including .biz, .co, .nyc, and .us.
Primary domains product offerings include:
Primary Registrations: Using the company's website or mobile application, it offers customers the ability to search for and register available domain names with the applicable registry. The company's inventory for primary registrations is defined by the number of TLDs it offers. As of December 31, 2024, 458 different generic TLDs, such as .com, .net, and .biz, and 58 different country code TLDs, such as .co, .ca, .in, and .jp, were available for purchase through GoDaddy. Since 2013, hundreds of new gTLDs were launched through ICANN's ‘new gTLD program’ initiated in 2012 (the Expansion Program), making it easier for companies and individuals to find and register new, easy-to-remember domain names tailored to their ideas, industry, or interests. ccTLDs are important to the company's international expansion efforts, as it found international customers often prefer the ccTLD for the country or geographic market in which they operate. The company's primary registration offering relies heavily on its search, discovery, and recommendation tools, which enable its customers to find a domain name that matches their business needs and goals. The company also sells domain registrations through relationships with third-party resellers and provides back-end registry services supporting approximately 180 TLDs.
Aftermarket: The company operates a domain aftermarket platform, which processes aftermarket, or secondary, domain name sales, and it maintains a portfolio of more than 1.0 million domain names. It designed its aftermarket platform to enable the seamless purchase and sale of previously registered domain names through an online auction, an offer and counter-offer transaction, a ‘buy now’ transaction, and automation and lease-to-own options for its customers. In addition, it allows its customers to ‘List for Sale’ names under their registration, and it provides functionality for the entire registrar network to list expiring domains from their platforms and ‘List for Sale’ functionality to registrar partners, allowing their registered customers to list domain names within GoDaddy's aftermarket. These various channels provide a diverse inventory available to meet the demand from its customers. In addition, the company's GoDaddy Investor mobile application helps investors watch and bid on domains at auction and stay on top of their current bids from their mobile devices. It operates a cross-registrar network that automates transaction execution across registrars, thereby reducing the time required to complete a transaction.
Registry: GoDaddy Registry is a provider of domain name registry services. GoDaddy Registry operates or provides back-end registry services to approximately 180 registry TLDs, including ccTLDs, such as .us, .tv, and .co, city TLDs, such as .nyc and .sydney, gTLDs, such as .club, .health, and .design, and branded TLDs, such as .chase and .godaddy. The company's integrated registry solutions provide policy and operational support, and domain marketing, sales, and strategic planning.
Domain Name Add-ons: Domain name add-ons are features that are offered for purchase concurrently with domain name registrations and have low costs associated with their delivery. For example, in addition to privacy features included at no cost with every domain registered with GoDaddy, the company offers more advanced full domain and ultimate domain protection products exclusively focused on protecting its customers' domains against bad actors and online risks, as well as domain ownership products, to prevent the accidental loss of a domain name.
Hosting and Security
For more technically sophisticated WebPros and other customers, the company provides high-performance, flexible hosting and security products. It designs these solutions to be easy to use, effective, reliable, flexible, and provide great value. The company offers a variety of hosting and security products enabling its customers to create and manage their identity, or in the case of WebPros, the identities of their end-customers.
The company's primary hosting and security products include:
Shared Website Hosting: The term ‘shared hosting’ refers to the housing of multiple websites on the same server. Shared hosting is the company's most popular hosting product. It operates, maintains, and supports shared website hosting in its owned and operated data centers and its leased co-located data centers using either Linux or Windows operating systems. The company offers several tiers of website hosting plans to suit the needs and resources of its customers, a majority of which use industry-standard cPanel or Parallels Plesk control panels. It also bundles its hosting plans with a variety of applications and products, such as web analytics and SSL certificates. WordPress is the most used CMS on the company's shared hosting platform.
Virtual Private Servers: The company's broad range of virtual private server (VPS) offerings allows its customers to select the server configuration best suited for their applications, requirements, and growth. The VPS solutions provide its customers with a single virtual machine that runs multiple other virtual machines for other customers. The company's VPS is designed for customers who need greater control, more advanced technical capabilities, and higher performance than offered by its shared hosting plans.
Security: The company's security product portfolio is a comprehensive suite of tools designed to help its customers secure their online presence. The portfolio includes SSL certificates to help ensure information is secure between browsers and servers through encryption; the use of a content delivery network to improve a website's performance; a proprietary web application firewall to help keep customers' websites safe from hackers; managed security with malware scanning and site cleanups; and a skilled team of security professionals working to secure its services or to provide support in the event of a disruption to its solutions.
Experiences
GoDaddy Airo
Airo is an intelligent experience that can help proactively build and grow the customers' businesses with the power of AI. Airo operates across the GoDaddy ecosystem and is built to activate intelligent, proactive experiences within other GoDaddy solutions. Airo aims to help its customers by anticipating their needs and providing solutions through informed interactions across the GoDaddy suite of products and services, small business industry expertise, knowledge queries, and best practices.
GoDaddy Guides
The company's GoDaddy Guides consist of specialists worldwide who are readily available to provide care to and build strong relationships with its customers throughout their lifetime. The customers deeply value expertise and know-how that is individualized and unique to their ventures, and the company's Guides are trained and supported to provide the high-quality, responsive, and personalized guidance that its customers need. In addition, the company's GoDaddy Guides market its brand through their recommendations of its solutions to specifically meet the needs of its customers to support their growth.
Technology and Infrastructure
Technology and development expenses, including those expenses related to the company's technology platform, were $814 million in 2024.
Physical Infrastructure and Management
The company's physical technology infrastructure supports its products, experiences, and business systems through servers located in data centers around the world. As a website hosting platform, it invests significantly in its peering architecture and underlying infrastructure management to handle significant Internet traffic at low bandwidth costs. The company invests in the automation of common physical data center components, like servers, load balancers, switches, and storage, and it uses open-source solutions when possible to automate manual processes and thereby reduce the risk of human error and lower costs. Additionally, it leverages a common automated infrastructure based on OpenStack and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to enable next-generation services. The company continues to migrate many of its non-hosting products and internal systems to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and an optimized company-owned cloud infrastructure. These and other efforts have reduced its managed physical footprint by approximately 80% over the last three years and have accelerated its ability to provide speed and reliability in both its product and customer experiences. These efforts and the company's technology infrastructure footprint allow it to scale and provide its customers with valuable products at affordable prices.
Customer Experience and Business Systems
The company's platforms provide its global customers easy-to-use products, by allowing it to experiment and quickly deploy improvements incorporating its data insights. The company's investments in its platform capabilities include the following:
E-commerce Platform and Application Services: The company invests in the architecture and capabilities of its e-commerce platform to create an ecosystem. The platform broadens its distribution channels by being extensible and allowing resellers to easily sell its products. It seeks to continuously launch new and relevant applications and streamline its existing offerings to provide the best user experience to its customers.
Data Platform: The company's horizontal data platform helps it be a trusted source of data about its customers and their online ideas through accurate, meaningful, and easily consumable data insights, which allows it to build best-in-class, personalized experiences for its customers. Its data platform is key to helping it deepen its customer and business insights, which enable innovation through instrumentation, experimentation, and analysis.
Content and Marketing Platform: The company's content and marketing platforms leverage the latest technology, operational, and production models that enable it to deliver customer-centric digital experiences at an accelerated pace through multiple touchpoints and channels. Its content platform and content creation processes help it realize efficiencies and scalability, which enhance its ability to drive new, high-quality products and customer experiences to market faster. It focuses on driving advancements in experimentation, the speed and volume of content creation, localization, and content self-service, while ensuring platform availability and performance. The company also delivers new engagement marketing capabilities that improve business effectiveness and customer experiences.
Product Development
The company continues to expand the ways it serves its customers to adjust to their changing needs from primarily domain name registration and hosting to a broader spectrum of offerings. Its primary website building products (Websites + Marketing, Managed WordPress), website security suite, email offerings (Microsoft 365), commerce products, and domain aftermarket each represent significant need states that are complementary to its long-standing offerings and benefit from its strengths as a company in human-infused technology. The company's key product development initiatives include:
Powering a Simple and Effortless Presence: The company offers a range of solutions that help its customers publish their ideas online, including Websites + Marketing and Managed WordPress. These solutions combine mobile-optimized website builders with an integrated set of marketing and e-commerce tools, all of which are enhanced with AI. The company continues to invest in Websites + Marketing and other tools, templates, and technology to make building, maintaining, and updating a professional-looking mobile or desktop presence simple and easy. It harnessed the foundational expertise it cultivated with respect to AI to introduce multiple customer-facing capabilities in generative AI across its suite of products, including Airo to deliver personalized website content, logos, domains, ready-to-use social media posts, marketing calendars, email communications, and more. The automation and content creation abilities inherent in these tools elevate the discoverability of and engagement with its products, creating a true one-stop-shop experience. This further enhances its customers' capacity to market their products, sell online, manage their businesses, and grow, all in a seamless, low-friction manner.
Making the Business of Business Easy: The company's business applications range from domain-specific email and email marketing to telephony services and payment tools to help its customers communicate with their customers and grow their ideas. For example, GoDaddy Conversations is a communications platform that helps small businesses support, engage, and convert customers through email, text, online chat, social media, voice, and video conversations. GoDaddy Conversations is also integrated with Google's Business Messages, allowing customers with Websites + Marketing plans to receive messages from their customers using Google Search and Google Maps. The company intends to continue investing in the breadth of its product offerings to help its customers connect with their customers and run their ventures.
The Next Generation of Naming: The company is a global player in domain name registration, with approximately 81 million domains under management. It offers easy and efficient domain name search tools through its website and mobile application, including search using business descriptions, which enables GoDaddy to better understand intent and suggest a wide variety of creative domain and business name recommendations that suit a customer's needs. In addition, through GoDaddy Registry, the company operates or provides back-end registry services to TLDs. It also offers an expanded secondary market to help match buyers to sellers who already own domains. The company continues to invest in search, discovery, and recommendation tools and transfer protocols for both primary and secondary domains. In 2024, it started preparations for and work on an approach towards its participation in the next ICANN gTLD round. In addition, GoDaddy Registry now provides domain name blocking that is designed to help rights holders take control of their online identity.
Partnering Up: The company's flexible platform enables it to form strategic partnerships and quickly launch new products and offerings for its customers, including through partnerships, such as Microsoft 365 for productivity solutions. Additionally, it has built a robust pipeline of future partnership opportunities to continue identifying value-added product and service offerings.
Harnessing the power of generative AI for its customers: The company designs its generative AI-powered tools and experiences to enhance its customers' discoverability of and engagement with the full suite of its product offerings and reduce the friction inherent in establishing their online presence and growing their businesses. Its Airo, an AI-powered experience designed to build and help grow businesses online, implemented powerful generative AI tools into Websites + Marketing and brought AI-powered solutions to GoDaddy Pros with GoDaddy's AI Assistant in the Pro Hub. In 2024, the company continued to build its AI-powered solutions and capabilities with the following:
GoDaddy Airo: The company continued to build Airo with increased investments in marketing initiatives to support a broader rollout to its customers, and now includes Airo for customers that start with a website purchase. Airo also provides advanced logos and imagery, as well as marketing tools to help its customers grow their businesses.
Site Optimizer: The company introduced its Site Optimizer tool, which can inspect any website and provide actionable recommendations to improve performance.
Managed WordPress: The company expanded AI-generated content in Managed WordPress, including optimized and enhanced models to generate content for multiple pages of its customers' websites, making it easier for customers to build and publish websites.
Helping customers sell anything anywhere: The company's commerce solutions are designed to grow with its customers' businesses by enabling them to seamlessly sell both offline and online, from online marketplaces and social platforms, while easily managing their sales in one place. In 2024, the company launched and upgraded the following commerce products and services:
GoDaddy Payments Canada: The company launched its first international market for GoDaddy Payments with the expansion into the Canadian market, offering Canadian merchants the lowest pricing compared to Canadian providers, and similar processing and payment acceptance solutions that U.S. merchants enjoy.
Tap to Pay on GoDaddy App: The company launched Tap-to-Pay capability in the GoDaddy Mobile App for Android phones, lowering the barrier for millions of small businesses to start accepting in-person, contactless payments in a seamless, low-friction sign-up experience.
Smart Terminal Flex: The company launched the new GoDaddy Smart Terminal Flex, a powerful and compact POS device in the GoDaddy Smart Terminal line that is powered by GoDaddy Payments.
GoDaddy Payments' Subscription Plans: The company launched two new subscription plans for GoDaddy Payments customers that combine lower transaction fees with advanced commerce features, like customized invoices and Pay Links, online ordering, inventory management capabilities, and access to GoDaddy Payments' credit card surcharge program and rate saver.
Marketing
GoDaddy is an Internet brand in the U.S. with brand awareness globally. The company established this high level of brand awareness primarily through its advertising campaigns across various platforms, including television commercials, print, online, and billboards, and supplemented these advertising campaigns with its own entrepreneurial customers and social media influencers. Its strong brand helped it attract and retain 20.5 million customers as of December 31, 2024. The company intends to continue investing in its brand as it seeks to further grow its total customers.
The company complements its brand marketing efforts with focused and metric-driven direct response marketing to acquire new customers. It uses a variety of targeted online marketing programs for lead generation, including search engine marketing, search engine optimization, and targeted email and social media marketing campaigns, as well as more traditional direct marketing and indirect channel partner marketing programs, to drive interest in its products and traffic to its websites. As part of this effort, the company regularly runs campaigns simultaneously and constantly refines its media mix across its channels.
As of December 31, 2024, the company had approximately 10.0 million customers outside of the U.S. and derived approximately 32% of its total revenue from international sales in 2024. It built a dedicated team responsible for ensuring scaling and, when necessary, the localization of its core product offerings, as well as its customer care and marketing efforts. Its historical international investments have enabled it to successfully launch and expand its business outside the U.S., and as of December 31, 2024, the company markets and sells to customers in markets around the world.
Regulation
The company's business is subject to regulation by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), federal and state laws in the U.S., and the laws of other jurisdictions in which it does business.
The company is accredited by ICANN as a domain name registrar and registry, and thus its ability to offer domain name registration products is subject to its ongoing relationship with, and accreditation by, ICANN.
Intellectual Property and Proprietary Rights
As of December 31, 2024, the company had 368 issued patents in the U.S. and other countries covering various aspects of its product offerings. Additionally, as of December 31, 2024, it had 11 pending U.S. and international patent applications and intends to file additional patent applications in the future. As of December 31, 2024, the company had 588 registered and 55 pending trademarks in jurisdictions, including the U.S., the E.U., the UK, China, and Germany.
History
GoDaddy Inc. was founded in 1997. The company was incorporated in Delaware in 2014.
