GoDaddy Inc. (GDDY) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
July 30, 2026
What were the key takeaways from GoDaddy Inc.'s July 30, 2026 earnings call?
In GoDaddy's Q2 2026 earnings call, the company reported revenue of $1.3 billion, up 7% year-over-year, and normalized EBITDA of $434 million, reflecting a margin expansion of over 200 basis points. Notably, the annualized bookings run rate for Airo surged to $50 million, a significant increase from $10 million just a quarter prior, indicating strong customer adoption. Management narrowed full-year revenue guidance to $5.215 billion to $5.255 billion, maintaining a growth outlook of 6% at the midpoint, while projecting Q3 revenue in the range of $1.315 billion to $1.335 billion, representing 5% growth at the midpoint.
What topics did GoDaddy Inc. cover?
- Airo Growth and Adoption: Airo's annualized bookings run rate increased 5x to $50 million, reflecting strong customer engagement and satisfaction. Management stated, "Customers are choosing Airo at a rate that is exceeding our expectations," highlighting the platform's potential as a comprehensive solution for small businesses.
- Revenue Performance: Total revenue for Q2 was $1.3 billion, exceeding the midpoint of guidance. The Applications and Commerce segment grew 11% to $515 million, driven by customer adoption of solutions, while Core Platform revenue grew 4% to $783 million.
- AI Transformation Strategy: GoDaddy is focused on integrating AI into its operations, with Airo serving as the centerpiece of this transformation. Management emphasized that "Airo can build out the comprehensive experience of whatever a small business needs to operate," indicating a shift towards a more integrated service offering.
- Guidance Adjustments: Management narrowed full-year revenue guidance to $5.215 billion to $5.255 billion, reflecting a cautious outlook due to the impact of the .CO registry contract expiration. For Q3, they expect revenue between $1.315 billion and $1.335 billion, indicating a more conservative growth expectation.
- Customer Retention and Engagement: Retention rates improved above 85%, with over 70% of Airo users adopting two or more products. This trend supports GoDaddy's strategy of increasing customer lifetime value through enhanced product offerings.
What were GoDaddy Inc.'s July 30, 2026 results?
- Total Revenue: $1.3B (vs $1.25B est, +7% YoY)
- Normalized EBITDA: $434M (vs $400M est, +14% YoY)
- Free Cash Flow: $443M (vs $390M est, +13% YoY)
- Annualized Bookings Run Rate for Airo: $50M (up from $10M last quarter)
- Core Platform Revenue: $783M (up 4% YoY)
- Applications and Commerce Revenue: $515M (up 11% YoY)
GoDaddy's strong Q2 performance and the rapid adoption of Airo position the company well for future growth, despite some concerns regarding the transition of traditional products to the new AI platform. The focus on integrating AI into their offerings and maintaining strong free cash flow provides a solid foundation for shareholder returns. Investors should monitor the effectiveness of Airo's integration and its impact on customer retention and engagement as key catalysts moving forward.
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Christie Masoner
executiveWelcome to GoDaddy's Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. Thank you for joining us. I'm Christie Masoner, VP of Investor Relations. And with me today are Aman Bhutani, Chief Executive Officer; and Mark McCaffrey, Chief Financial Officer. Following prepared remarks, we will open up the call for your questions. [Operator Instructions] On today's call, we'll be referencing both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures and other operating and business metrics. A discussion of why we use non-GAAP financial measures and reconciliations of our non-GAAP financial measures to their GAAP equivalents may be found in the presentation posted to our Investor Relations site at investors.godaddy.net or in today's earnings release on our Form 8-K furnished with the SEC. Growth rates represent year-over-year comparisons unless otherwise noted. The matters we'll be discussing today include forward-looking statements, such as those related to future financial results and our strategies or objectives with respect to future operations. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that are discussed in detail in our periodic SEC filings. Actual results may differ materially from those contained in forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today, July 30, 2026. And except to the extent required by law, we undertake no obligation to update these statements because of new information or future events. With that, I'm happy to introduce Aman.
Amanpal Bhutani
executiveGood afternoon, and thank you for joining us. At GoDaddy, our purpose is to make opportunity more inclusive for all. Our strategy is to serve our customers' needs across the entrepreneur's wheel. And AI is fundamentally changing how our customers create and grow their businesses and how we execute on our strategy. We have built and positioned Airo as an agentic operating system for small businesses. Airo is the centerpiece of GoDaddy's largest initiative, our AI transformation. The AI transformation will enable us to continue to build on our significant track record of delivering value for both our customers and shareholders. When we introduced Airo almost 3 years ago, it was an AI-powered experience that helped our customers discover, engage and adopt more of our products. Last quarter, Airo AI Builder took a significant step beyond that as a distinct agentic experience. Today, we have unified Airo and Airo AI Builder into a single platform as an agentic operating system for small businesses simply called Airo. Airo can build out the comprehensive experience of whatever a small business needs to operate from storefronts and booking systems to client portals, and it helps our customers run their businesses day-to-day. Everything our customers relied on before lives inside the singular immersive AI experience. Airo for small businesses is our biggest focus and source of excitement and customers are loving it. I work directly with Airo customers every week, and their response tells me we are building exactly what they need to succeed. Customers are choosing Airo at a rate that is exceeding our expectations. Annualized bookings run rate has increased 5x to $50 million, versus the $10 million we shared just 1 quarter ago, and engagement continues to build among our high-intent customers. The momentum behind Airo is undeniable and just as important, the quality has improved as we have scaled. Nearly all of this growth has been organic, demonstrating strong customer interest even before we have meaningfully leaned into marketing. Customer satisfaction also remains high, giving us confidence heading into the second half of the year. We are actively testing Airo in the domains purchase path, which is a high bar since it is our largest funnel and one that has been optimized for conversion and attach with our existing products for years. With a number of enhancements already underway, we expect to scale marketing and deliver continued strong traction for Airo. The world is evolving quickly, and we are meeting the moment. Small businesses are engaging with technology in entirely new ways, and we are transforming our experience to meet them where they are going. That requires making deliberate choices about where we invest our time, talent and capital, recognizing that investments carry different return profiles. Our priority is to build the best end-to-end AI operating system for our customers. As part of that shift, we are deemphasizing a few products as stand-alone offerings and bringing their capabilities into Airo, simplifying the experience and enabling customers to build and manage increasingly sophisticated web experiences themselves. More broadly, as AI reshapes how small businesses create and manage their online presence, we expect the need for traditional products like do-it-for-you services and template-based website builders to narrow and evolve over time. As the transformation unfolds, GoDaddy is well positioned with an earned right to win grounded in a value creation strategy that remains consistent. Building a business online takes more than a layer of AI. It takes secure hosting, payments, customer engagement tools and dozens of other jobs. Most small businesses lack the time or expertise to stitch together themselves. We have built one of the most trusted brands in small businesses over nearly 3 decades, backed by more than 20 million customers, a strong distribution advantage, a broad set of solutions, deep technology expertise and a care organization that knows our customers and the needs of small businesses better than anyone. Our AI transformation is how we are putting those trends to work. Our vision for Airo is to deliver all of that as one integrated immersive experience, and that completeness is what differentiates GoDaddy. We remain focused on generating profitable growth by attracting high-intent customers who adopt more of our technology and in turn, drive higher lifetime value. The mechanisms may evolve through AI or pricing or merchandising or other means, but the model remains remarkably durable. In addition to Airo, there are 3 other connected work streams in the AI transformation at GoDaddy, and I'm excited to briefly touch on these today. First, we are reinventing our own operations to be AI native to improve customer outcomes and increase the speed of innovation. In Care, Airo continues to improve resolution rates across both chat and voice with the 24-hour repeat contact rate for customers served by our voicebot dropping by over 16 percentage points in Q2. This allows our Care teams to focus their expertise on more complex needs and on guiding customers as they build their businesses. We are also using Airo to power processes internally at GoDaddy, giving us the opportunity to test new capabilities and rapidly improve the product through everyday use. That same rigor extends to how we fund this work. Scaling Airo at this pace comes with investment and managing it carefully matters as does the innovation itself. We anticipated the rise in AI compute costs and took actions early to offset them, giving us room within our financial framework to support both greater AI usage and increased marketing behind Airo. We continuously test across multiple models to make sure we are creating the expected customer experience while using the most effective and efficient option for each job. That discipline gives us confidence in our ability to manage compute and token costs as Airo scales over the long term. The second and newest workstream in the AI transformation is doubling down on GoDaddy APIs being better designed for consumption by agents, including LLMs. This quarter, we launched the GoDaddy Developer Platform, a new generation of domain APIs that allow developers and AI systems to search, purchase, configure and manage domains directly within the tools where they are already working. LLMs are increasingly becoming a large surface for creating software and businesses, and this enables our platform to be equally accessible to both people and AI. This is our first step. Today, these APIs focus on the domain life cycle, but over time, we see the opportunity to expand this approach across more of our platform, making it easier for AI systems to securely interact with a broader set of GoDaddy capabilities, including Hosting and Commerce. On ANS, our third workstream intended to help shape the infrastructure of the agentic web, we achieved strong new alliances this quarter. Identity and discovery are essential layers of the open agentic web, and domains are the natural foundation for both as the web moves towards an agentic future. To that end, GoDaddy enhanced the Agent Name Service standard, launched it in production and this quarter announced our intent to contribute it to the Linux Foundation. On Discovery, we codeveloped the Agentic Resource Discovery specification, or ARD, alongside many of the world's leading technology and AI companies. ARD helps solve agent discovery, making it possible to locate tools, skills, agents and other resources instantly. Together, ANS and ARD point to the same conclusion: Domains are and will remain a trusted foundation for identity and discovery in an AI-driven Internet, and that trust enhances and extends the value and demand for domains well into the future. Our Q2 financial performance and the work we have shared today showcases a company executing on both the business we have today and the business we are building for the future. We stay focused on the fundamentals and what we can control. Our core initiatives, pricing and bundling, seamless experience and Commerce continue to perform well, strengthening our high-intent customer base and reinforcing the durability of our model. At the same time, the momentum in Airo is giving us greater confidence in the role GoDaddy will play as AI reshapes how small businesses are created and grown. We will host an Investor Night in December, which will give us the opportunity to connect the AI transformation work underway across the company with the value it can create for our customers and our shareholders. There is much more ahead, and we look forward to sharing it with you. With that, here's Mark.
Mark McCaffrey
executiveThanks, and good afternoon, everyone. We are advancing our AI transformation while maintaining the financial rigor that has long defined GoDaddy. Our second quarter results build on our track record of focused execution. We delivered revenue above the midpoint of our guide and expanded our normalized EBITDA margin by over 200 basis points. We generated strong free cash flow of $443 million with trailing 12-month free cash flow of $1.73 billion. We continued our responsible and prudent capital allocation program, repurchasing $852 million as of July 29, reducing our fully diluted shares outstanding by another 7% this year to 127 million shares. Total revenue for the quarter grew 7% to $1.3 billion, and ARR grew 6% to $4.4 billion. International revenue grew 8% to $427 million. Our Applications and Commerce segment grew revenue at 11% to $515 million. Growth continued to be supported by customer adoption of our solutions. Segment EBITDA margin expanded roughly 250 basis points to 46.8%. Core Platform grew 4% to $783 million, on strength in primary domain registrations and renewals led by both .COM and higher-priced non-.COM TLDs, alongside a strong aftermarket quarter driven by higher volume. Segment EBITDA margin expanded to 33.4%. Total bookings grew 6% to $1.4 billion. Core Platform bookings grew 5%, representing acceleration from Q1 as we move past the peak of our promotional offer. Applications & Commerce bookings grew 7%. These are solid results against a dynamic environment, with AI driving rapid changes to customer expectations and engagement patterns. While our A&C bookings from traditional products is moderating during this period of transition, we are moving quickly to anticipate these changing expectations. Moving forward, we expect Airo's scope to broaden, taking on capabilities that today live in separately priced products such as traditional do-it-for-you services and template-based website builders. We view this as a deliberate trade-off as Airo, monetized through a mix of subscription and token usage continues to scale. We are encouraged by what we are already seeing, higher engagement and stronger free-to-paid conversion rates on Airo. Over time, we expect this combined offering to be even more valuable than the separately priced products that our customers engage with today. Through this transformation, as always, we will remain disciplined in how we invest in growth, ensuring that we earn attractive returns as we drive growth. This approach positions us to continue generating strong free cash flow and shareholder value well into the future. Underpinning our transformation is the durability of our model where high-intent customers who adopt more of our solutions retain at higher rates and ultimately generate greater lifetime value. Our distribution network has long been a key advantage in engaging our customers. Once customers are within the GoDaddy ecosystem, we can surface the best next product at the right moment, shortening the time it takes customers to engage, publish, and derive incremental value with more of the platform. These underlying fundamentals are continuing to strengthen alongside our transformation. More than 50% of our customers have at least 2 paid products with us, and that percentage continues to grow with the adoption of Airo. What's even more encouraging is that over 70% of our customers who have used Airo this year have 2 or more products, which is higher than our non-Airo cohorts. Retention continues to improve above an already enviable 85%. ARPU increased 9% to $250 and the number of customers spending more than $500 annually continues to become a larger part of our customer base. This is what a durable, self-funding model looks like, expanding margins and strong cash conversion, funding our AI transformation while still returning capital to shareholders. Normalized EBITDA grew 14% to $434 million, with margin expanding more than 200 basis points to 33.4%. Free cash flow grew 13% to $443 million, with normalized EBITDA continuing to convert to free cash flow at better than 1:1. Our strong free cash flow, low leverage and high liquidity provide us the flexibility to keep investing in our AI transformation while aggressively returning capital to shareholders. We ended the quarter with $1.2 billion in cash and total liquidity of $2.2 billion. Net debt was $2.7 billion, representing a net leverage of 1.4x on a trailing 12-month basis and well within our target range. During the second quarter, we repurchased 6.6 million shares for $554 million. Year-to-date, through July 29, we have repurchased almost 10 million shares for $852 million, reducing fully diluted shares outstanding by 7% since the beginning of the year. Turning to our outlook. We are narrowing our full year 2026 revenue guidance to a range of $5.215 billion to $5.255 billion, representing 6% growth at the midpoint. As a reminder, the full year guide absorbs just over 200 basis points of cumulative impact from the .CO registry contract expiration and our consistent exclusion of high-value aftermarket transactions. For Q3, we are targeting total revenue within a range of $1.315 billion to $1.335 billion, representing 5% growth at the midpoint. The third quarter represents our toughest compare on strong aftermarket performance last year. For both the third quarter and the full year, we expect A&C revenue growth in the low double digits and Core Platform growth in the low single digits. Absent any FX impact, we expect bookings and revenue growth rates to be at or above parity for the remainder of the year. We are projecting a normalized EBITDA margin of approximately 33% for Q3 and reaffirm our full year margin target of over 33%, reflecting continued operating leverage and AI-driven productivity alongside rising investments in AI products, platform, marketing and compute. Q2 normalized EBITDA benefited from the timing shifts of certain costs, some of which we expect to be incurred in the second half of the year. We reaffirm our full year free cash flow target of approximately $1.8 billion with normalized EBITDA conversion greater than 1:1. On capital allocation, we operate within a disciplined returns-based framework and have deployed greater than 95% of our free cash flow over the last 4 years toward share repurchases. Our continued commitment to returning capital reflects our confidence in the strength of our cash flow and the long-term value we are creating. We remain focused on allocating capital to the highest value users with a priority on driving long-term shareholder returns. Taken together, the combination of our free cash flow with our approach to capital allocation puts us on track to deliver on our North Star of a 3-year CAGR of over 25%, well ahead of the 20% target we set at our last Investor Day. Finally, I would like to formally invite you to our Investor night on December 1, 2026, at our Tempe, Arizona headquarters. We will expand the programming of our typical Investor Dinner and use that evening to provide a more comprehensive view of our strategy, how the workstreams you heard about today come together and what they mean for our customers, our business and our shareholders. As the world is evolving, we are launching the experiences to match the moment as we transform the principles behind our strategy and model, our focus on profitable growth compounding free cash flow and disciplined capital allocation are staying firmly in place. We look forward to seeing many of you there. With that, I'll turn it back to Christie for your questions.
Christie Masoner
executiveThanks, Mark. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Vikram Kesavabhotla from Baird.
Vikram Kesavabhotla
analystMy first one is on the Domains business. And Aman and Mark, it'd be great to hear your perspective on your current competitive position within primary domains and specifically, when we think about the emergence of AI agents as part of the customer journey and some of the different strategies taking shape across the industry. I'm curious if you're seeing any changes in that business one way or another. And from a high level, it'd be great if you could talk about some of the steps you're taking to ensure that GoDaddy remains successful in primary domains as customer behavior and discovery patterns evolve. And then separate from that, I also wanted to ask about the A&C segment. You referenced in the prepared remarks that bookings from some of your traditional products are moderating as you go through this transition, can you help us understand the magnitude of some of the headwinds coming from those products? And going forward, when do you think the ramp in Airo monetization will reach the point of offsetting some of those headwinds?
Amanpal Bhutani
executiveThanks, Vik. Let me start with domains and then we'll come back to A&C. On the Domains business, for over a couple of decades, GoDaddy has been the leader in domains and many, many business models. And sort of changes in technology have happened during that time. So we feel very good about GoDaddy's overall position with AI and the advent of LLMs, we're definitely seeing some changes in that business overall. And we are actually meeting the moment in terms of what's happening. So as you probably saw, we launched GoDaddy's APIs in a new and renewed format. This is literally addressing the changes we're seeing in the domains business today. With the new GoDaddy APIs. Those APIs can work very well for LLMs and AI. Just as well they work for our partners today. That's going to allow us to handle some of the changes that are happening in the Domains business and actually put more competitive and innovative products in the market that GoDaddy has an advantage because we have so many of our own products that we can bundle together and put into the API. So we really think that's an area we can address. I think overall, Mark can maybe comment on a little bit on our overall positioning. We have continued to maintain a very healthy share in terms of overall primary domains. Obviously, Q2 was a strong quarter, but I'll leave that to Mark.
Mark McCaffrey
executiveYes. And just on the domains element, our market share around domains is consistent with prior periods, right? And that's the broader term of domain. So it includes all the TLDs, including non-.COM [ gTLDs ] out there as well. And Vik, going to your A&C comment, no doubt we are in a dynamic environment. Our customers are broadening their use of the AI. We couldn't be more excited about the transformation we're entering into with Airo and the strong early growth signs. We believe this is going to be faster as we start to increase the purchase paths around Airo in the coming quarters. We're expecting bookings in A&C to be in the high single digits for the remainder of the year. We'll probably have more information as we get further throughout the year as to when we think those inflection points will happen, but we couldn't be more happier with the growing adoption of Airo today.
Amanpal Bhutani
executiveYes. And just to touch on the strategy behind the overall A&C segment. Our strategy with A&C has been to attach products across the entrepreneur's wheel for our customers. With Airo, we've greatly accelerated that strategy. What we thought of as a 5-, 7-year strategic product roadmap can now be seen as 1- to 3-year roadmap. We can use AI to very quickly integrate our products with Airo and Airo does a great job in terms of product discovery and attach, and it beats our existing web-based attach funnels. The overall vision for Airo is to cover a majority of the jobs to be done for small businesses, effectively creating a competitive AI operating system for those small businesses, and our focus is to optimize it for our customers. Like I said, since we have so many products ourselves, we can bring them to Airo much faster than others. Just in the last 4 months, we've put Airo AI Builder out there about 4 months ago. We've added GoDaddy payments. We've added customer communication and multiple other capabilities to Airo just in the last 4 months. And as we look at the next few months, we're going to introduce a host of Commerce capabilities. We'll even get into things like customers being able to have business telephone numbers, IVRs and voice and video capabilities that will all work within the AI immersive Airo experience. I work with Airo customers all the time, and I'm amazed at what they can do themselves. And that delight that they have with the product, that's the path to greater attach. That's the path to greater A&C. And that's the path to getting strong lifetime value for GoDaddy.
Mark McCaffrey
executiveYes. And just to add to that, the trade-off is we used to have separate SKUs for Commerce, but now it's all the capabilities are included within Airo and we will get to see the transaction value related to that. But the reality is that becomes a second or a third attached product. When we get to second or third attached products with our customers, as we have always said, the retention goes up. The retention goes up, the LTV goes up over time. So we believe this is going to be more valuable over time than our existing customer -- existing products out there.
Christie Masoner
executiveOur next question comes from the line of Ken Wong from Oppenheimer.
Hoi-Fung Wong
analystFantastic. I wanted to dig in a little more on the AI disruption angle. Aman, are you able to share perhaps where you're seeing some erosion? Is this by channel? Is this upmarket, downmarket? How does it impact the domain funnel, which you guys obviously are highly dependent on? And then Mark, just on the guidance, like good to see an acceleration in Q4. But I guess considering you're lapping the kind of the disruption and go-to-market comps and also the domain, the gTLD comp, like I would have assumed a little more of an uptick. Just would love any color on what type of conservatism is baked into that number.
Amanpal Bhutani
executiveYes. On the domains funnel, we continue to see very healthy domain funnel economics and traffic and conversion. In Q2, we continue to have a healthy rate. Now things are dynamic and evolve over time when new stuff is happening. There's no doubt that the LLMs are playing a part, and we see that shift in search traffic. We've talked about it in the past, and we're continuously improving GoDaddy's services to work better with the LLMs. Where we particularly see the changes with the API domains and this is new services and new business models that are sort of getting attention. And like I said, over the last couple of decades, we've seen other similar plays. And over time, our strategy remains the same, but we have to evolve. We have to provide more competitive products, which is why we relaunched GoDaddy's APIs, especially in the domain space. And you'll see us launch APIs for our other products too because we want to be able to bring forward a very competitive offering to LLM so that we rank better in LLM so we get better traffic from them. And as we see the shift between search and LLMs that GoDaddy is there and is able to be competitive over the short, medium and long term.
Mark McCaffrey
executiveYes. And Ken, on the guidance and what we're looking at for the back half of the year, keep in mind, while we're lapping the $4.99 offer, that's a bookings impact we'll see immediate, but the revenue still rolls out throughout the year. So we'll still have some headwinds related to the revenue from the discount that we offered in the first part of the year. That, coupled with the fact we don't include the high-value transactions in our guidance that is our standard practice, that gets you to where we are with the range right now.
Christie Masoner
executiveOur next question comes from the line of Mark Zgutowicz from The Benchmark Company.
Mark Zgutowicz
analystAman and Mark, maybe just a couple on Airo. You indicated that Airo will absorb capabilities currently sold under separately priced products while you're seeing your A&C bookings moderating. I'm just curious how much of your existing bookings are attached to those products that you mentioned are being deemphasized, if you will, and at what level Airo subscription and token revenue, what level is that required to sort of replace those economics? And then a separate question on the exposure to domain path traffic. What percentage of domain traffic is being exposed to Airo today? And what are you seeing in terms of initial conversion, product attach and bookings relative to legacy W+M? And then the last one just related is how much marketing actually occurred related to Airo in 2Q? And what do you have planned for the second half? Just trying to get a sense of how much of the Q2's, I guess I would call it a cost timing benefit or how much of that reverses into 3Q and 4Q?
Mark McCaffrey
executiveI'll take the first part of it, Aman, and then maybe you can get into the domains and where we stand with that. Thanks, Mark. When we look at the products impacted, there will be a few capabilities in there. I won't go through the entire list, but some examples, we talked about Commerce already. Again, Commerce is not going to go away per se, but some of the capabilities that were in separate SKUs now will be built in, right? Another example is do-it-for-you. Our professional services used to be transactions around a couple of thousand dollars. Now our customers are coming in and doing most of that work themselves. Some of it is going through Care as well, but the need for professional services is narrowing as we go further. So the impact on that business will start to wane over time. Putting or quantifying each specific area, I think we're early in the process here as we're going through that. The way I would look at it at a high level, probably was about a point to our total bookings this quarter. And obviously, the growing impact of Airo and the adoption is still early stage. We're seeing some great traction. We're seeing our customers convert over from WAM to the Airo to do a lot of their work. But we still have some work to do around the purchase paths, what we're offering, the attach and all that, which we'll be doing in the second half of the year. So the transition period, I would say, we put the numbers out there for the rest of the year. As we get more data points and talk to you on December 1 at our Investor Dinner, we'll give more guidance as to what that means for the future period.
Amanpal Bhutani
executiveAnd the second and third point are actually related -- question are actually related, Mark. So when we actually tested Airo in the Domains path in Q2 as well, as I talked about last quarter, and it performed quite well. But Websites + Marketing, as you know, is very deeply integrated into all our attached funnels. So what Airo has to be is not just website building with Websites + Marketing, but all of it, all of the attach capability that it has. And that's what Mark just referenced. We still feel good about being able to replace that in the second half of this year. As you will remember, we talked about it sort of a year's journey to be able to put in new capabilities that would replace Websites + Marketing. We still feel good about that time line. We're doing new tests in Q3 with it as well. And adding it to the domains path is an important gate for us to add more and more marketing spend because having it in the domains path allows us to put more marketing behind it. We did put a small amount of marketing behind it in Q2. It was not a large number. We actually saw a good result in terms of new customers coming and engaging with the product, but that's where we've got to do the work to convert them and then get the attach and make all of that work. But we're encouraged by the small level of test we did in Q2, and we intend to continue to ramp that up in Q3 and Q4. In terms of how I think about the marketing, the core principles of sort of the guardrails that we have and the return-based framework for marketing is staying the same. We still believe in the same way of being disciplined in marketing. We're looking for those pockets where we can spend dollars and get great return. And we see great possibility to do that, especially as we get Airo into the domains path, which should be sometime in the next few months.
Mark McCaffrey
executiveAnd just to follow up on that, we called out that some costs would be moving from the quarter to the second half of the year and marketing is an example of some of those costs.
Christie Masoner
executiveOur next question comes from the line of Elizabeth Porter from Morgan Stanley.
Elizabeth Elliott
analystGreat. It was really impressive to see Airo's bookings run rate increase from $10 million to $50 million in one quarter. So could you just help us unpack some of the bigger drivers of growth factors between things like new paying customer additions, kind of the higher ARPU with attached and then the incremental token consumption? It would be helpful just to understand within the cohorts, where are you seeing the bigger momentum? Is it more by new customers or some of those existing customers from GoDaddy.
Amanpal Bhutani
executiveYes. Thanks, Elizabeth. So as you know, we have only about 4 months of data. And I would say for the first 2.5, 3 months, we mostly saw only existing customers. The large majority of customers even engaging with Airo were existing customers. But as we start to put even a little bit of marketing spend behind it and started to surface Airo on more of the GoDaddy landing pages, we've started to see new customers engaging with the product. So we're seeing a good sign-up rate for Airo for completely new GoDaddy customers as well. And in terms of the economics, we continue to feel very good and confident about the economics of the product. We've talked about how we are approaching Airo. Our goal is to create a fantastic outcome for our customers while also having a profitable product. And we do that by just how we approach customers, what we spend to get them. We do that by what AI costs we deliver, what models we use, and we deliver that by how we add attach to the product, again, within the Airo experience. So all of it is very seamless for the customer, and we keep a very close eye on the economics on it. In terms of tokens, as you see, we continue to see good results there. Customers engage with Airo, a percentage of them are very, very engaged and they buy a lot of tokens, and they continue to build what we think are just fantastic, not just websites, but full-on web applications that they're building, and they're able to do it themselves.
Mark McCaffrey
executiveYes. Just to call out, we're seeing better free-to-paid conversion with Airo than we were seeing prior to Airo.
Elizabeth Elliott
analystGreat. And then you previously talked about the pricing and bundling contribution just being paused as Websites and Marketing. Transition upgrade occurs. I just wanted to give a sense for kind of where we are on that transition? And when do you think pricing and bundling can resume to contribute to ARPU and bookings? Is this something where Websites and Marketing, once it reaches customer metric parity, we expect pricing to resume immediately? Or is there any sort of additional lag period as you look to validate unit economics and retention? Just some of the key factors you're monitoring there with respect to pricing?
Mark McCaffrey
executiveYes. So I'll start. Pricing and bundling continues to be a contributor to our growth in the underlying products that we have out there, even as we're making this transition. We've called out in the past, the Websites + Marketing pause that we made, and now we're pointing to the fact that we're building in the capabilities of Websites + Marketing directly into Airo in and of itself. So the bundling and pricing, alive and healthy, working. It will evolve as we start to look at the capabilities we're including in Airo versus the products we are attaching to Airo. That is something that will be -- we'll have more information on as we go throughout the year, but pricing and bundling is still contributing.
Christie Masoner
executiveOur next question comes from the line of Arjun Bhatia from William Blair.
Willow Miller
analystI'm Willow on for Arjun Bhatia. I have a pricing question as well. Given the dynamic environment, just to use your words, is GoDaddy offering more promotional pricing now versus previously? For example, when I go on the website, I can see a free trial for the higher tier of the website builder in addition to a pop-up for that $5 1-year domain promo that I believe you've called out in the past. Essentially, I'm just hoping to better understand your pricing strategy with promotional pricing.
Amanpal Bhutani
executiveYes. The only change to pricing or promotions that you're seeing on the homepage, Willow is related to Airo. Because we have a new product, we're giving 50 free credits for people to come in and try the product. There's no actual new promotional pricing. In fact, as you probably remember, over the years, we have really reduced the viral promotions, and we continue to maintain a very low level of promotional pricing. The 2 core pricing promotions that we have is the $4.99, and that's one per customer and then what we launched with Airo.
Mark McCaffrey
executiveAnd one for new customer.
Amanpal Bhutani
executiveOne for a new customer, yes.
Christie Masoner
executiveOur next question comes from the line of Alexei Gogolev from JPMorgan.
Eleanor Smith
analystThis is Ella Smith on for Alexei. So we have 2. First, historically, at your last Investor Day, you cited that pricing and bundling was the largest lever to your forward revenue growth. As you look ahead, what do you think the largest lever would be? Is it Airo? Is it partner -- product partnerships? Or is it something else?
Amanpal Bhutani
executiveYes. We absolutely feel very good about Airo. The way Airo is growing and customers are engaging with it, the way we see free-to-paid conversion, we think this is a massive opportunity for our customers to really build what they want and get their brand and their experience out there in a manner that just wasn't possible with previous tools. So a lot of things are going to point to Airo and super excited about that. In terms of pricing and bundling, given our large portfolio of products and 20 million customers, pricing and bundling will continue to evolve, but be, no doubt, part of our strategy, part of what we're going to do over the next few years.
Mark McCaffrey
executiveAnd then you asked about partnerships and you threw that in there. We think that is a great opportunity. We've been very successful with some of our partnerships, but being -- Airo is an operating system that allows us to integrate partnerships a lot more going forward. So we think that will be a contributor as we continue to grow A&C and other products within the entrepreneur's wheel.
Eleanor Smith
analystVery clear. And for a follow-up, your customer base as it stands is largely solopreneurs. Do you see the composition of your customer base changing as you build out agentic web offerings? In other words, would you sell to larger SMBs or enterprises?
Amanpal Bhutani
executiveYes. We're still pretty focused on small businesses, and there's a lot of time and opportunity there. So that's what we're focused on. Over time, we'll keep you informed as things evolve.
Christie Masoner
executiveOur next question comes from the line of Robert Coolbrith from Evercore.
Robert Coolbrith
analystI was just wondering, maybe you could sort of contextualize how the quarter went versus your expectations. It seems like core did quite well from a bookings perspective. I was just wondering, was there a rapid shift in customer behavior where more customers are coming to you just for domain they're like, okay, I've already got a completed project or something that I'm just trying to find a domain for. Was there a dramatic shift in attach for presence? Or is it more just about that pause on pricing and bundling and Websites + Marketing. This was more or less to how you thought it was going to play out? Just trying to understand a little bit better.
Mark McCaffrey
executiveYes. Robert, thanks. There are always puts and takes in any quarter. This quarter, I would say we started to enter the phase of transformation. Probably the biggest shift we saw was the customers engaging in Airo faster and more than we anticipated and the acknowledgment that they wanted everything in a simple-to-use, one-platform status. So things like Websites and Marketing became a capability that now we're moving into Airo. And that shift obviously changed the dynamic around how we're engaging with our customers. But even in those dynamics, when you look at what we were able to do for the quarter, we were ahead on free cash flow per share growth. It's close to 28%. Our normalized EBITDA margin, 33%. We converted our free cash flow on a greater than 1:1 basis. We showed the acceleration in bookings coming out of Q1 into Q2, and our revenue, obviously, was above the midpoint of the guide. So our expectations were pretty much in line, while there were, I would say, different moving parts within that a little bit, we were largely very happy with the performance this quarter.
Robert Coolbrith
analystGot it. And on the ramp in the ARR at Airo, was that -- I understand that you're testing now on the domains funnel, but was there any other change in terms of your placement of Airo in the funnel? Or is it just purely organic, people saying, okay, I see both the traditional Websites + Marketing path and I see the Airo path in front of me and more people than perhaps anticipated going into Airo path. Maybe just a little more color there.
Amanpal Bhutani
executiveYes. A number of organic placements, landing pages for GoDaddy, just search SEO traffic finding it. And basically large majority of it being organic. There is some testing on the domains path, but that's only for a limited amount of time because the test runs only for a certain period for us to gather the data. But very large majority of what we see is organic. That's what gets us very excited. Customers just coming to GoDaddy using the product, they just love the product. And if I haven't said it already, customers love the product. We get really good feedback from customers for a product that's new, that's launched just a few months ago, it's really good numbers. So pretty excited about it.
Robert Coolbrith
analystGreat. Last quick one, just on the API endpoint distribution. If you could talk a little bit about maybe what you're seeing from the MCP integration with Anthropic and how do you broaden that distribution to other LLMs? And how finally do you think the LLMs will be incentivized? Or how ultimately do they get to -- will the customer get to your endpoints versus someone else's?
Amanpal Bhutani
executiveYes. We've worked to optimize against the LLMs, and we went down a path a little while ago to say, look, we should just rethink our API strategy because the LLMs use APIs, people are building apps using LLMs and the LLMs have to be able to natively consume GoDaddy products. So that was the rebuild for domains. Again, super excited about that. It's very new. You might have seen the press release, I think, just last week. And we're very quickly going to bring other products online, too. What these APIs do is they provide the LLMs with the key information the LLMs need to be able to automatically consume those products. And that, we think, is a good step-up from what we had earlier. So again, super excited about that, too. That's pretty early, but hopefully, in a quarter or 2, I'll be talking about that with equal excitement as I am with Airo today.
Christie Masoner
executiveOur next question comes from the line of Naved Khan.
Naved Khan
analystGreat. I'm just trying to unpack the slowdown in the A&C bookings. And I think you called out a few things over there, but maybe 100 basis points, if I heard you correctly, I think is attributable to the -- maybe the fact that do-it-for-you maybe shifting over or transitioning into Airo-led enablement. But are there some other things to call out here? Because if I look at the comp year-on-year, you had an easier comp. In spite of that, we saw a 200 basis point decel. Just trying to understand what are the components of that.
Mark McCaffrey
executiveYes. Thanks, Naved. And not going through all the capabilities we're moving into Airo. I think the biggest examples you can look at are the ones you pointed out, the professional services around do-it-for-you as an example, we're seeing narrower pipelines related to our customers' needs for complex websites or us creating them for them. But then Websites + Marketing also is another example where we've moved those capabilities in, and you've seen a drop-off in the need for Websites + Marketing within our A&C portfolio. So those are 2 examples, probably a few out there at the end of the day. But as we continue to ramp Airo and we see the engagement over time, Airo will become a bigger part of the growth story as it starts to fall off. Just one point of clarification there, Naved, the 100 basis points, that was for our total bookings number, not specific to A&C. So just FYI as you try to reconcile the numbers back.
Naved Khan
analystOkay. And then, I guess, the $150 million ARR growth in App Builder, is that counted in the A&C as well? Or is that -- is it somewhere else? How should I understand that in terms of its impact in the bookings? And maybe just staying on this bookings topic, should I just maybe understand that maybe Airo is maybe sort of deflationary because DIFM may be a higher-priced product and Airo can -- maybe doesn't need to necessarily cost as much. Just your thoughts on that.
Amanpal Bhutani
executiveYes. On the do-it-for-you product, that's typically a couple of thousand dollars in terms of bookings when we're building with someone. And with Airo, it's a smaller number, and it's a subscription plus token-based product. And what we find is that Airo is so much easier for customers to use that they can just talk to a guide and build it themselves very quickly. So that's the main thing about the do-it-for-you product. And I think, Mark can confirm, but I think your other question was that is Airo counted in A&C, and I believe that would be yes.
Mark McCaffrey
executiveYes, Airo is counted within A&C. That's right.
Naved Khan
analystSo with that, why shouldn't we have a pickup in A&C bookings in the back half if Airo is seeing an acceleration and you're probably going to put some marketing dollars also behind it?
Mark McCaffrey
executiveYes, we're in. Naved, we're looking at this as a transformational period as we start to engage our customers in different channels. It's new into the market. So the tough period of time that we expect for it to start to be a bigger part of our growth is still something we're working through. Right now, we expect A&C bookings to be high single digits for the remainder of the year. And obviously, we'll update everybody as we get more data points as to how the other channels are working when we get to December 1.
Christie Masoner
executiveOur next question comes from the line of Ygal Arounian from Wedbush Securities.
Ygal Arounian
analystI just want to understand the LLM traffic shift a little bit better and exactly what's going on. So can you explain what that traffic shift is? And what -- are people going to use different products? Are they coding directly in Anthropic and OpenAI? Like what's happening in that shift? Where are they going instead of GoDaddy? Because it sounds like it's not yet a one-to-one replacement on Websites + Marketing versus Airo. And does all this change your approach? I think you were planning on rolling out a new website plus marketing or an update. Does your focus shift on where you're building from here? And then I have a follow-up.
Amanpal Bhutani
executiveYes. Just to go very quickly, the LLM comment is related to APIs and newer models for people offering APIs that LLMs can consume directly. And those end up being very low-cost providers on the domain side. And again, we've seen many models of that over the years, and we're updating our APIs to be able to compete and have better bundles and sort of offerings for customers. It's just that in this case, LLMs would consume that on behalf of the customers. And on the upgrade of Websites + Marketing, we actually -- as I talked about it, we have tested a new product that updated Websites + Marketing. Over the last quarter, we actually found that Airo could be all those products that we were looking at. So in fact, just over the last few weeks, we've launched a sort of much stronger editor and templating capability within Airo, and that's just going to get stronger. We now feel very good about Airo actually being the one operating system, the one tool that can build your websites in different ways that can do customer communications for you that can do payments, that can do Commerce and many, many other things. So we're actually seeing a convergence of what we were talking about earlier.
Ygal Arounian
analystOkay. Sorry, to be clear on the API functionality or the API usage, that means people are building websites the way that they would through GoDaddy in the LLMs. And then just a follow-up on margins. And so with all of this, I mean, we've talked about this a lot, and we've seen pretty material margin erosion in other places and competitors as they rolled out more Vibe Coding products. And as you maintain your margin guidance for the year even as the Airo ARR is growing and you're seeing some of these shifts in behavior. Has anything changed in terms of how you can balance the cost side on compute as you build out this product? Do you still have this advantage the way you've had it over the last year where you haven't seen margins erode?
Mark McCaffrey
executiveYgal, I'll comment on the margins real quick. We feel really good about our positioning around our margins and anticipating the costs that we will incur related to higher compute costs, higher token and all that. We are very focused on making sure where we're spending our time is getting the right ROI like we've done in the past. We have the same approach to what we've done everything. And we've gone into productivity gains in our operating model right now that we're starting to see. Think about it from our headcount and our headcount costs are remaining flat. We're seeing benefits in Care. We're seeing benefits in T&D. We're seeing benefits in G&A. All those benefits translate into our ability not only to continue to expand our margin, but also reinvest in the business around these areas like Airo that we're going to see the return, and we feel really good about the data points that show us those returns right now. So we feel we're in a great position to continue to focus on profitability, expanding margins at the same time, handle the costs associated with new products. Obviously, when we get to December 1, we'll talk a lot more about what that will look like going into 2027, but we feel good about our ability to not only maintain profitability, but to increase -- continue to expand profitability going forward.
Christie Masoner
executiveOur next question comes from the line of John Byun on for Brent Thill at Jefferies.
Sang-Jin Byun
analystSo I have 2 questions. One is something that's come up earlier, but I just want to see if I can maybe ask a little bit differently. I mean the transition period with Airo, I mean -- and I know it's still very early, and this is still evolving. But I mean, are you thinking that's something that's like a 2 to 3 quarters type of transition? Or could this last more than a year well into 2027? And then my second question was around kind of the WordPress community and the professional web developers and website creators and partners. I mean, how are you thinking about the impact of what's happening now to your customers on that side?
Mark McCaffrey
executiveI'll take the first part, John, not putting a timetable on this. We've talked about what we expect to see for the rest of the year. And as we gather data points, we'll share more of what we think the outlook will be when we get together on December 1 in Tempe. We are excited about the growth in Airo. We've talked about the $50 million run rate. Having said that, we are still in the process of launching it into Domain's purchase path. We're looking at connection points for more attach. So there's still a lot of data to gather for us to really hone in on the timing of this transition and when we will see Airo contributing more to our growth going forward.
Amanpal Bhutani
executiveAnd just on the WordPress side, we do have Airo for WordPress and it continues to get traction with those customers. But that world is evolving, too. We're seeing some traction with Airo with that world as well. But it's too early, John, to be able to talk about it to say where it's really going. Our focus is to create an operating system for small businesses, whether that's used by the customer directly or through a developer, it kind of shouldn't matter to us.
Christie Masoner
executiveOur next question comes from the line of Chris Zhang from UBS.
Chao Zhang
analystFirst one is on the international revenue, which continued to outpace the overall company or the U.S. on a constant currency basis. Maybe can you help us unpack the drivers across the segments and also in terms of the pricing actions versus the top of the funnel? And what portion of that you see as more durable going forward. And just to get a little more color on international? And then I have a follow-up.
Mark McCaffrey
executiveYes. On the international, nothing to really call out there. It's performing well. We're seeing traction in the markets we are focusing on. We came in at 8%. I would say there's nothing specific to call out in any region one way or another. We're just really happy with the performance internationally as we are with the performance in the U.S.
Chao Zhang
analystAll right. I appreciate it. And just a quick follow-up on the Core Platform bookings. I think you mentioned the outlook for the rest of the A&C bookings for the rest of the year, but sorry if I missed it, but what are you expecting for the Core Platform bookings growth for the second half of this year?
Mark McCaffrey
executiveYes. We should see a little bit of strength. I know we've talked about on a long-term basis that bookings growth in Core Platform will be low single digits. You might see that lean a little towards more mid-single digits for the remainder of the year as we lap the $4.99 at the back half.
Chao Zhang
analystGot it. So roughly stable versus the second quarter?
Amanpal Bhutani
executiveYes.
Christie Masoner
executiveAll right. I am going to hand it over to Aman to close this out. Please go ahead.
Amanpal Bhutani
executiveThank you. Thank you all for joining. Again, I'll leave you with a couple of takeaways. One, super excited about Airo and its fast growth and how much customers love it and the engagement we're getting. And to the questions on the AI transformation, I just want to point out that our strategy, our financial discipline, our approach to investment remains unchanged. We're very happy with how we're approaching this business, and we want to meet our strategy of sort of meeting small businesses where they are and offering them a ton of services. So a huge thank you to all GoDaddy employees, and thanks for joining.
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