AI Is Lifting GoDaddy’s Margins. Growth Is Less Certain
The company credits artificial intelligence for efficiency gains, while top-line growth remains steady
GoDaddy ended 2025 with higher margins and steady growth, and management used its fourth-quarter earnings call to position artificial intelligence as increasingly embedded across the business.
The company reported nearly $5 billion in revenue for the year, up about 8% from 2024. Normalized EBITDA margin reached 32%, and free cash flow rose 19% to roughly $1.6 billion. Management guided to further margin expansion in 2026.
On the call, CEO Amanpal Bhutani described AI as central to how the company builds and sells products. “AI tools are now generating the majority of our code,” he said, adding that “new code bases are almost entirely AI-generated.” CFO Mark McCaffrey tied those shifts to profitability, saying “continued operational execution aided by AI-driven efficiencies were the main drivers of expansion.”
The margin gains are reported. Revenue from AI-specific products is not disclosed separately.
AI Is Showing Up in Margins
Profitability has expanded over multiple years, and management now expects normalized EBITDA margins to exceed 33% in 2026. Bhutani described internal systems that generate most new code and automate customer interactions. The company said an internal AI sales agent handled thousands of calls and chats in early 2026.
Industry data show similar changes across software development. The 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey reports broad engagement with AI tools and large language models. Academic research analyzing GitHub repositories has documented autonomous coding agents generating complete pull requests across multiple programming languages. AI-assisted engineering workflows are spreading across the sector.
GoDaddy’s acquisition engine remains stable. Verisign’s Domain Name Industry Brief reported roughly 386.9 million domain registrations worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2025, reflecting year-over-year growth. Domains continue to serve as the company’s primary funnel, described by Bhutani as a “strong, durable cash-generative engine.”
Higher margins, continued domain growth, and expanded use of AI tools appear together in the company’s results. The financial statements show improved profitability. They do not isolate how much of that improvement stems directly from AI rather than pricing, scale, or cost discipline.
Revenue Growth Remains Measured
While margins improved, revenue growth remained within a familiar range. For 2026, GoDaddy guided to roughly 6% revenue growth at the midpoint of its outlook. Applications & Commerce is expected to grow in the low double digits, while Core Platform is projected to grow in the low single digits.
The AI narrative focused on Airo, a new experience intended to increase product attach and lifetime value. Bhutani said “the velocity of a second product attach accelerated by nearly 30% relative to non-Airo cohorts,” and that cumulative annual spend from Airo cohorts has grown in the high teens. McCaffrey said material contribution from Airo is not included in 2026 guidance.
Those Airo metrics were presented during the earnings call but are not reported separately in segment revenue disclosures.
Management also introduced Agent Name Service, or ANS, designed to link AI agents to domain-based identity through DNS. The company announced an integration with MuleSoft, a Salesforce subsidiary. No revenue from ANS was disclosed.
Across the sector, AI features are now common in earnings commentary. Reuters reported that Wix rolled out AI-powered website tools as part of its product strategy while maintaining adjusted EBITDA margins in the low 30% range. Shopify has reported higher revenue growth rates than GoDaddy in recent quarters, alongside adjusted operating margins below GoDaddy’s level.
The comparison shows different financial profiles. GoDaddy operates with margins comparable to or above peers, while revenue growth remains in the mid-single-digit range outlined in guidance. AI is embedded in its engineering and product roadmap, and management attributes part of its efficiency gains to that shift. The reported results show a more profitable business; they do not yet show a change in its growth trajectory.