Item 1. Business

Overview

GoDaddy is a global leader serving a large market of entrepreneurs, developing and delivering easy-to-use products in a one-stop shop solution alongside personalized guidance. We serve small businesses, individuals, organizations, developers, designers and domain investors. Our vision is to radically shift the global economy toward life-fulfilling entrepreneurial ventures. Our mission is to empower entrepreneurs everywhere, making opportunity more inclusive for all. We are passionate about our mission and honored that entrepreneurs trust their ideas with us. Our 21.0 million customers are passionate and determined to transform their ideas into something meaningful. They often face a complex road to success, and our ability to evolve and build products to meet our customers' needs uniquely positions us to help our customers navigate their journey.

Our customers' journeys are non-linear and we design our services to help across all aspects of their business. Each phase in the journey can be iterative in nature; customers are constantly revisiting different stages of their entrepreneurial experience to improve and grow across what we call the "Entrepreneurs' Wheel." The Entrepreneurs' Wheel focuses on three areas: identity, presence and commerce solutions. As the needs of our customers changed and expanded, we evolved our products and services to meet them where they are on the Entrepreneurs' Wheel. Our customers often start with the most intimate of brand considerations, their identity, which we provide through our domain services that blend into their connected social identities and online presence.

As their entrepreneurial needs evolve, we help our customers manage and grow their presence and connect with their customers through our expanded service offerings and access to relevant third-party products and platforms, including website building and hosting, marketplace syndication, social media and bio site management, security, business products and email and other services. In 2023, we introduced multiple customer-facing capabilities in generative AI to further enhance the customer experience. In the fourth quarter of 2023, we introduced GoDaddy Airo in the U.S. GoDaddy Airo is an AI-powered solution designed to build and help grow businesses online by delivering personalized website content, a logo, domain-based email, ready-to-use social media posts, a marketing calendar, email communications and more.

Within commerce, our customers need to integrate dynamic information everywhere they engage with their audiences, including customer touchpoints such as appointment availability, retail inventory, digital subscriptions and social media. GoDaddy's product and service offerings provide a high-performance back-end registry technology platform and an integrated suite of payment systems and point-of-sale hardware and software to seamlessly manage online and offline commerce.

At GoDaddy, we believe our customers should have both great technology and great customer support. We believe engaging with our customers in a proactive, consultative way through personalized guidance via phone and/or digital experiences sets them up to succeed. Through the thousands of daily conversations we have with our customers, we gather valuable feedback enabling us to continually evolve our products and solutions and respond to their changing needs.

Our people and unique culture have been integral to our success. We live by the same principles that enable our customers' ideas to survive and thrive, including owning outcomes, building value, joining forces, working courageously and living passionately. We take responsibility for delivering successful outcomes based on data driven decisions, which we believe is a key factor driving our customer and revenue growth. We also believe we have one of the most recognized Internet brands in the U.S., and our international awareness remains high in our top markets.

Our stable and durable business model is driven by strong brand recognition, efficient customer acquisition, high customer retention rates and increasing lifetime spend of our customers. In each of the five years ended December 31, 2023, our customer retention rate was approximately 85%, and in 2023, our retention rate for customers who had been with us for over three years was approximately 92%. Additionally, in 2023, we had over 1.5 million customers who each spent more than $500 a year on our product offerings. We believe the breadth and depth of our product offerings, seamless ease-of-use in a one-stop shop and the high-quality, personalized guidance and responsiveness from GoDaddy Guides continues to build strong customer relationships leading to our high customer retention rates. In 2023, we generated $4,254 million of revenue, up 4.0% from $4,091 million in 2022, and we generated $4,603 million in total bookings, up 4.3% from $4,414 million in 2022.

Our Customers and Solutions

GoDaddy is built to serve entrepreneurs by providing easy-to-use products on a single technology platform wrapped with personalized guidance.

Our Customers

We serve several customer populations: (i) Independents, (ii) WebPros, (iii) Domain Registrars and Investors, and (iv) 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 the rest of the world. We aim to establish and provide solutions that address these differences.

Our largest customer population, Independents, consists mostly of microbusinesses and noncommercial endeavors. These microbusinesses 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 our help to create a unique and secure identity, especially with the more technical aspects of their online presence. Although our 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.

Our second largest customer population, WebPros, are website designers and developers who build websites on behalf of businesses and noncommercial organizations. We estimate that half of all global website builds occur through a third party, such as our 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 our simplicity and guidance as tools to increase their throughput and maximize the use of their time. We help our WebPros customers in a number of ways beyond our product suite and services, including providing tools to help them save time, make money and exceed client expectations. These client management applications make it easier for designers and developers to manage their clients' websites at any host, or on GoDaddy products such as Managed WordPress. With our products and services, WebPros can easily manage 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. We support a variety of third-party control panels and content management tools favored by WebPros including cPanel, Plesk, Drupal, Joomla and more.

Our third largest customer population is Domain Registrars and Investors. Domain registrars are organizations that have their own domain registration offerings, but who use our domain registration and management platform. These commercial arrangements provide for strategic relationships with many key platforms and enable further scale of our domain registration technology and insights. 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 our business in the form of liquidity and the ability to help our other populations (Independents and WebPros) successfully find a domain name they prefer.

We also serve Third Party Registrars and Corporate Domain Portfolio owners. We serve third party registrars 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 our customers' ideas, businesses and brands. We also provide a fully managed registry platform for other registry operators. We manage the full technology and operating stack at scale for over 200 TLDs including some of the largest brands in the world. Corporate Domain Portfolio owners 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 that can provide committed support with the highest levels of security, service and domain management.

Our Solutions

We designed and developed an extensive set of easy-to-use technology products to enable our customers to establish an identity, connect with their customers across multiple platforms and online marketplaces and deliver a seamless customer experience in a connected commerce world. We understand that no matter what our customers' needs are, or what stage of their idea they are focusing on, our customers want a "one-stop shop" solution. We offer our customers products and services to meet them at every stage of their journey.

Our domain name registration products enable us to engage customers at a common starting place for establishing an exclusive personally branded identity and often are an on-ramp for our other products. Domains are a part of our Core Platform business, and we believe our Applications and Commerce products are a natural adjacency to our domain registration products. Applications and Commerce products, including our proprietary website building, commerce and productivity solutions, significantly improve our value proposition to customers, thereby increasing our revenue and margin growth opportunities and improving our customer retention. Our omni-commerce payments platform and GoDaddy Payments recognize our customers' needs and provide for cost-effective solutions. We believe our payments solutions enable our customers to quickly and easily participate in the digital economy with a seamless transition to sell in-store or on marketplaces and social platforms. We have also made significant investments in the localization of many of our product and service offerings, as 48% of our customers are located in international markets (notably the United Kingdom (UK), Canada, India and Australia). And, while not a standalone product, our GoDaddy Guides consist of approximately 6,300 specialists worldwide who are readily available and provide care to customers who have different levels of technical sophistication.

In 2023, we launched GoDaddy Airo in the U.S. GoDaddy Airo is an AI-powered solution designed to save our customers time. Airo enables our customers to build and help grow businesses online by delivering personalized website content, a logo, domain-based email, ready-to-use social media posts, a marketing calendar, email communications and more.

We manage and report our business in the following two segments:

• Applications and Commerce (A&C)**, which primarily consists of sales of products containing proprietary software, notably our website building products, as well as our commerce products and third-party email and productivity solutions and sales of certain products when they are included in bundled offerings of our proprietary software products.

• Core Platform (Core)**, which primarily consists of sales of domain registrations and renewals, aftermarket domain sales, website hosting products and website security products when not included in bundled offerings of our proprietary software products as well as sales of products not containing a software component.

Applications and Commerce

Bringing an idea to life online requires the right tools and products to establish a presence. GoDaddy Websites + Marketing, Managed WordPress, GoDaddy Studio and other GoDaddy offerings are a part of a customer's presence that enable anyone to start, grow and scale their businesses. Our customers come to GoDaddy to build a professional website, attract customers, sell their products and services and accept payments online and in person. GoDaddy's easy-to-use tools help microbusiness owners manage everything in one place.

Applications Products

Our primary applications products include:

Websites + Marketing. Websites + Marketing is an easy-to-use, do-it-yourself, mobile-optimized online tool that enables our customers to build effective websites and e-commerce enabled online stores with minimal technical skill. We offer 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 our editor by adding intent-driven sections, photos, videos or text. Our design templates cover a wide range of categories with professionally written content for small businesses, organizations, families, weddings and other ideas. We design our 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 our streamlined, optimized website building experience that allows our customers to easily build and manage a faster WordPress site that offers more flexibility and power than our Websites + Marketing solution. With our Managed WordPress site, we manage the administrative tasks for our customers, allowing them to spend more time on building or growing their business. We offer a variety of plans, with pricing based on various features. Our Managed WordPress sites are built with enhanced security, automatic, regular backups and core updates, integrated Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), one-click migration tools, pre-installed extensions, plugins and themes, business email and backups and a staging site. We also offer Managed WooCommerce Stores, giving our customers the freedom to sell anything, anywhere online, from physical products to digital downloads, services and subscriptions.

Digital Marketing. We offer 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 our website and commerce tools, or as a stand-alone offering for customers using other website content-management systems. The tools are designed for busy customers who may lack experience with online marketing, focusing on ease of use, mobile experience and delivering business results. For example, our mobile application, GoDaddy Studio, allows our customers to grow their brands by easily creating impactful visual content for almost any online platform. Search Engine Optimization helps our 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 customers build targeted campaigns, either from scratch or using website or commerce content. Social Media Marketing helps 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 (f/k/a Twitter) and Yelp, among others, to help our customers acquire new customers and build stronger relationships with their existing customers.

Commerce

We aim to lead the small business commerce market by enabling GoDaddy customers of all sizes, from those just starting out to established businesses looking to scale and grow, to sell everywhere their customers shop. We design our commerce products to help our 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, we offer the lowest card transaction fees in the industry when compared to other leading providers, which allows our customers to keep more of what they make.

Our primary commerce products and services include:

Online Store. Our Websites + Marketing product includes online store capabilities, which allows our 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 our 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 our centralized dashboard. As part of the GoDaddy Commerce ecosystem, Managed WooCommerce Stores, our WordPress-based online store solutions, provide our customers everything they need to sell online, in person, and across popular marketplaces and social media platforms from one built-in experience. Similar to our Websites + Marketing product, Managed WooCommerce Stores include our centralized dashboard, allow for marketplace selling and are integrated with GoDaddy Payments and our Smart Terminal POS system.

Point-of-Sale (POS) Systems. We offer a countertop Smart Terminal for businesses with in-store operations. Our Smart Terminal is a modern, dual screen all-in-one POS system that allows our customers to manage in-store inventory and product catalogs and take payments. In addition, the Smart Terminal seamlessly integrates with both our 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 also offers access to third-party applications that meet merchants' needs that we do not address directly.

In addition to our Smart Terminal, we offer other payment acceptance solutions that allow our customers to take payments their way while seamlessly interacting with their customers wherever they may be. For example, we now include Payable Domains, a default payments system that creates a frictionless, out-of-the-box experience for our customers. Our Card Reader and Tap-to-Pay on the GoDaddy Mobile App (iPhone and Android) allow customers to take payments and sell on the go. Our Virtual Terminal allows customers to take payments from their smartphone, tablet or computer with Internet connection with no hardware needed. Our customers also have the ability to take online payments without needing to create a website through our Online Pay Links. Customers can brand and personalize these shareable pay links with their domain, giving them another

opportunity to build their brand. Pay links can be sent through text or email or shared on social media sites. We also provide merchants with QR code-based payments, allowing their customers to scan and pay through the GoDaddy Mobile App.

GoDaddy Payments. As a "payment facilitator," GoDaddy Payments enables our 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 our 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 other leading providers. In addition, GoDaddy Payments is built-in as a payments acceptance method in all our U.S. and Canada commerce products for easy enablement.

Email and Productivity Solutions

Our customers want to spend their time on what matters most to them, selling their products and services or helping their customers do the same. We provide them with productivity tools such as domain-specific email, telephony and online storage to help run their ventures. We offer a variety of products designed to make the business of business easier for our customers. The products we offer include those developed in-house as well as third-party applications which we distribute and support, such as Microsoft 365.

Our primary email and productivity solutions products include:

Email Accounts. We offer a range of email service plans with a multi-feature web interface that connects to our customers' domains. The pricing of these plans depends on the customer's desire for additional features, including HIPAA- compliant email, advanced email security, archiving, and additional business applications such as Microsoft Teams. All our email accounts are ad-free and we offer added security functionality designed to protect from spam, viruses and other forms of online fraud, such as phishing.

Microsoft 365. We offer fully-supported Microsoft 365 accounts that are easy to set up and use with our customers' domains. We offer 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, we offer an email backup service, and for customers needing to comply with regulatory requirements, we offer email add-on services such as HIPAA-enabled email, encryption services (in partnership with ProofPoint), archiving services (in partnership with Barracuda) and advanced e-mail security. We help make Microsoft 365 installation easy, allowing customers to be up and running in minutes, including "do-it-for-me" migration services to move customers' existing email data to Microsoft 365 accounts.

In 2023, 2022 and 2021, we derived approximately 34%, 31% and 30% of our total revenue, respectively, from sales of our A&C products.

Core Platform

Domains

Every great idea needs a great name and GoDaddy is the leading global 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, we provide our 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 our domain products often serve as the starting point in our customer relationships. We are a global leader in domain name registration, with approximately 85 million domains under management as of December 31, 2023. Based on information reported in VeriSign's most recent Domain Name Industry Brief, this represented approximately 24% of the approximately 360 million domain names registered worldwide as of December 31, 2023. As of December 31, 2023, approximately 92% of our customers purchased a domain from us. In addition, GoDaddy Registry provides a high-performance back-end registry technology platform with a portfolio of TLDs including .biz, .co, .nyc, and .us.

Our primary domains product offerings include:

Primary Registrations. Using our website or mobile application, we offer customers the ability to search for and register available domain names with the applicable registry. Our inventory for primary registrations is defined by the number of TLDs we offer. As of December 31, 2023, 446 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 our international expansion efforts as we found international customers often prefer the ccTLD for the country or geographic market in which they operate. Our primary registration offering relies heavily on our search, discovery and recommendation tools which enable our customers to find a domain name that matches their business needs and goals. We also sell domain registrations through relationships with third-party resellers and we provide back-end registry services supporting more than 200 TLDs.

Aftermarket. We operate a large domain aftermarket platform, which processes aftermarket, or secondary, domain name sales. We designed our aftermarket platform to enable the seamless purchase and sale of previously registered domain names through an online auction, an offer and counter offer transaction or a "buy now" transaction and automation and lease to own options for our customers. We maintain a portfolio of more than 1.2 million previously registered domains, allow our customers to "List for Sale" names under their registration, provide functionality for the entire registrar network to list expiring domains from their platforms and, in 2023, opened "List for Sale" functionality to registrar partners allowing their currently registered customers to list domain names within GoDaddy's aftermarket. These various channels provide a diverse inventory available to meet the demand from our customers. Our 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. We operate a cross-registrar network that automates transaction execution across registrars thereby reducing the time required to complete a transaction.

Domain Name Add-Ons. Domain name add-ons are typically purchased concurrently with domain name registrations and have low costs associated with their delivery. In addition, where permissible, privacy features are included at no cost with every domain registered with GoDaddy. Domain names with privacy features are registered on an "unlisted" basis to help protect personal information, deter domain-related spam and allow our customers to confidentially secure a domain for an unannounced product, service or idea.

Registry. GoDaddy Registry is a world-leading provider of domain name registry services. GoDaddy Registry operates or provides back-end registry services to more than 200 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. Our integrated registry solutions provide policy and operational support, and domain marketing, sales and strategic planning.

Hosting and Security

For more technically sophisticated web designers, developers and customers, we provide high-performance, flexible hosting and security products that can be used with a variety of open source design tools as well as WordPress. We design these solutions to be easy to use, effective, reliable, flexible and provide great value. We offer a variety of hosting and security products enabling our customers to create and manage their identity, or in the case of WebPros, the identities of their end-customers.

During 2023, we have taken proactive steps to rationalize our hosting business and integrate or divest certain underperforming acquired hosting assets and brands. These efforts were undertaken to improve operational efficiency as we progress toward unifying our hosting platform under a single technology stack.

Our 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 our most popular hosting product. We operate, maintain and support shared website hosting in our owned and operated data centers and our leased co-located data centers using either Linux or Windows operating systems. We currently offer several tiers of website hosting plans to suit the needs and resources of our customers, a majority of which use industry standard cPanel or Parallels Plesk control panels. We also bundle our hosting plans with a variety of applications and products such as web analytics, SSL certificates and WordPress. WordPress is the most used content management application on our shared hosting platform.

Virtual Private Servers. Our broad range of virtual private server (VPS) offerings allow our customers to select the server configuration best suited for their applications, requirements and growth. Our VPS solutions provide our customers with a single virtual machine which runs multiple other virtual machines for other customers. Our VPS is designed for customers who need greater control, more advanced technical capabilities and higher performance than offered by our shared hosting plans. Our customers can tailor their VPS plans based on a range of performance, storage, bandwidth and operating system needs.

Managed WordPress Hosting. With our managed hosting products, we set up, monitor, maintain, secure and patch software and servers for our customers. We offer a variety of managed hosting plans to support our customers' needs including multiple tiers of Managed WordPress hosting on a platform optimized for WordPress. We also offer other managed environments that span across our VPS products like Joomla, Drupal and Magento and apps like Gallery.

Security. Our security product portfolio is a comprehensive suite of tools designed to help secure our customers' online presence. The portfolio includes (i) public key infrastructure (PKI) and SSL certificates to help ensure information is secure between browsers and servers through encryption; (ii) the use of a content delivery network (CDN) to improve a website's performance; (iii) a proprietary web application firewall (WAF) to help keep customers' websites safe from hackers; (iv) continuous malware scanning and site cleanups; and (v) a skilled team of security professionals to provide incident responses in the event of a disruption in service.

In 2023, 2022 and 2021, we derived approximately 66%, 69% and 70% of our total revenue, respectively, from sales of our Core Platform products.

Our Opportunity and Advantages

Our Opportunity—Empowering Entrepreneurs

Our customers represent a large and diverse market that we believe is fundamentally underserved by other Internet companies. The International Labour Organization, an agency of the United Nations, estimated in an October 2019 report that more than 90% of enterprises in many countries were small and medium size businesses (defined as having fewer than 250 employees). In the U.S., the U.S. Small Business Administration's Office of Advocacy indicated that there were approximately 33.2 million small businesses in the U.S. (based on the Census Bureau's 2019 Statistics of U.S. Businesses), and they were estimated to have represented approximately 43.5% of total U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) in 2014. Though these data points do not account for the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on small and medium businesses, we believe the pre-pandemic data demonstrates a significant market exists for our products and services, and we believe our addressable market extends beyond small businesses and includes individuals and organizations, such as universities, community organizations, charities and hobbyists.

Our customers are consumers themselves, which makes them keenly aware of the need to have an impactful online presence. While our customers' needs change depending on where they are in their journey, the most common customer needs we serve include:

• Identity**. Our customers want to develop an identity by finding a name that distinctly identifies their business, hobby or passion. We believe their identity includes not just a simple, mobile-enabled website, but the ability to get found across various search engines, social media platforms and vertical marketplaces. And while our customers' online identities start with creating and managing these points of presence, their identities are amplified through content generation and the ability to engage and transact online with their customers and audience.

• Presence**. Presence represents the need of our customers to present themselves to their customers, which they do through an ever-expanding set of options across social media, marketing channels, email, marketplaces and through their website. Being able to seamlessly create and post content quickly is imperative. What it means for our customers to be online continues to evolve. Today, having an effective online presence often means having a combination of: (i) a secure and content-rich website viewable from any device; (ii) a presence on social media channels (e.g., Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, X (f/k/a Twitter) and WeChat); (iii) getting found by search engines (e.g., Google); and (iv) establishing a presence on: (a) an increasing number of horizontal marketplaces (e.g., Yelp and Eventbrite); (b) vertical marketplaces (e.g., Zillow, OpenTable and HomeAdvisor); and (c) e-commerce platforms (e.g., Amazon, eBay and Etsy).

• Commerce**. Commerce recognizes that our customers need commerce to work seamlessly for them both offline and online. Our customers' customer expectations are set by how they engage with enterprise-grade experiences, which means they expect to be able to buy online and pick up in the store in a matter of minutes. A customer in the store expects to be recognized online seamlessly, while a customer online expects to transition to a store experience seamlessly. For service commerce entrepreneurs, their customers expect to find products and services online, engage through online messaging, book appointments digitally and complete transactions in-person.

• Interacting with customers as they grow their business. Our customers need to effectively communicate with existing customers and potential customers across a communication landscape that is fragmented in both form and

function. This landscape includes (i) branded email communication, originating with domain registration and email creation through an email client; (ii) online marketing in a variety of content types and channels; (iii) online commerce with reservation and scheduling, product catalogs and e-commerce and payment processing capabilities, including in-person point-of-sale payment processing; (iv) messaging capabilities across SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and other platforms; (v) email marketing for audience engagement; and (vi) telephony, for inbound and outbound voice communication. Surrounding these channels and tactics, our customers also need easy-to-use tools to run their businesses.

• Technology that is easy-to-use, reliable, secure, performance enhancing and evolves with their needs.** Our customers vary significantly, but they remain the same in their need for a simple platform and set of tools to enable their domain, website, marketing and commerce solutions to easily work together as their ideas grow and become more complex. In 2023, we launched GoDaddy Airo in the U.S. GoDaddy Airo is an AI-powered solution that is designed to build and help grow businesses online by delivering personalized website content, a logo, domain-based email, ready-to-use social media posts, a marketing calendar, email communications and more. Our products and services provide a platform that can meet the needs of entrepreneurs, who may not be technologically savvy, or WebPros, who have more complex requirements, and the range of customers in between who have different demands and levels of sophistication. All the while, our customers expect reliable products and want to be confident their digital presence is secure, even as they insert customization that can create vulnerabilities. Our customers work on their ideas whenever and however they can and need solutions fitting their lifestyle and schedule.

• Connecting with a real person when they need help.** Depending on their journey, a customer may seek guidance on setting up a website, launching new features or trying a new product or service and they need that guidance on their time. Our customers need real people who are readily available and can provide care to customers who have different levels of technical sophistication. In addition to guiding our customers along their journey, we also provide support by handling the most difficult and arduous tasks for them through a collection of managed service offerings.

• Affordable solutions**. Our customers often have limited financial resources and may be unable to make large, upfront investments in the latest technology. Our customers need affordable solutions to level the playing field with the tools to appear and act like bigger ventures. We aim to provide affordable products and services for our customers at every level to support their businesses.

Serving these customer needs creates a deep relationship, where we are viewed as not just a solution provider, but also a guide and partner to their entrepreneurial journey. This makes for a favorable business and economic model, aligning the interests of GoDaddy and our customers.

Our Advantages

Our customers serve many roles in their business; they simultaneously run marketing, accounting, service delivery operations, customer service, people operations and many other tasks. Time is their most valuable resource and complexity is their hindrance; our customers want an impactful online presence, but may not have the time and skills to make that happen. Our goal is to be a trusted partner to these entrepreneurs, bringing together the technology, ease of use and guidance necessary to bring their ideas to life online. We believe the following strengths provide us with competitive advantages in serving these needs:

Global Brand Awareness. Our global brand benefits from high awareness as one of the largest domain name providers, with approximately 85 million domains under management as of December 31, 2023. Based on information reported in VeriSign's most recent Domain Name Industry Brief, this represented approximately 24% of the approximately 360 million domain names registered worldwide as of December 31, 2023. Our global presence gives us the ability to leverage our brand — a competitive advantage when customers search for products and solutions. We have 21.0 million paying customers and an enduring customer retention rate of approximately 85%. We market and sell to customers in over 200 markets around the world and in 2023, 48% of our customer base and approximately a third of our revenue was derived from our international presence.

Seamlessly Intuitive Experiences. Our customers often self-identify as non-technical and inexperienced in areas such as marketing, content creation and customer management. Because they may lack the expertise to take full advantage of powerful tools, customers may be overwhelmed as they attempt to bring their idea online.

We believe the solution to this complexity is to radically simplify our solutions and services into seamlessly intuitive experiences like GoDaddy Airo. With Managed WordPress, we reduced the complexity of launching and managing WordPress sites so our customers can stay focused on growing their business, not managing complex WordPress hosting tasks. We provide this on a fully managed platform that delivers fast performance and AI-powered site creation. With Websites + Marketing, our

own captive CMS, we incorporate seamlessly intuitive experiences by uniting marketing, content, commerce and customer management tools into a single experience.

We also seek to leverage data and insights to personalize the products and experiences of our customers as well as tailor our solutions and marketing efforts to each of our customer groups. Starting in 2023, we harnessed the foundational expertise we cultivated with respect to machine learning and AI to introduce multiple customer-facing capabilities in generative AI across our suite of products, including GoDaddy Airo. The automation and content creation abilities inherent in these tools elevate the discoverability of and engagement with our products, creating a true one-stop-shop experience. This further enhances our customers' capacity to market their products, sell online, manage their businesses and grow, all in a seamless, low-friction manner. We constantly seek to improve our website, marketing programs and customer care to intelligently respond to each stage of our customers' lifecycles and identify their specific product needs based on experimentation. This allows us to interact more frequently with our customers and understand what products work well for them. We intend to continue investing in our technology and data platforms to harness the power of generative AI to further enable our personalization efforts and make our products even more intuitive for our customers.

Personalized Guidance. Our customers deeply value expertise and know-how, which has been part of the GoDaddy DNA through our GoDaddy Guides since our founding. Our customers' needs are highly individualized and unique to their ventures, which we believe makes operating a guidance experience – at scale – a competitive advantage.

In recent years, we extended this competency into several new interfaces and subject matters. These interfaces allow us to take learnings and insights gained from customer interactions to build and grow our product and service offerings and drive more thoughtful engagements for our customers. For example, within our Websites + Marketing platform, we are now creating customized action plans for our customers as they seek to market their businesses in a number of different channels based on the type of their venture and their geography. Additionally, we significantly increased the training and engagement content available to our customers, through a number of different content forums and across platforms like YouTube and Instagram.

GoDaddy Venture Forward Research Initiative. Established in 2018, GoDaddy's Venture Forward research initiative analyzes more than 20 million online businesses with a digital presence (measured by a unique domain and an active website). Most of these businesses employ fewer than ten people, categorizing each as a microbusiness. While these microbusinesses may be small, their impact on economies is outsized even though they are often too informal or too new to show up in traditional government statistics. Venture Forward’s data helps those studying, reporting on or advocating for entrepreneurs understand developing themes and insights into microbusiness/digital entrepreneurship, and we share this data to download for free and update it quarterly.

Operations

Human Capital

Our people embody the same grit and determination as our customers. Our world-class engineers, designers, marketers and GoDaddy Guides share a passion for technology and its ability to change our customers' lives. We live by the same principles that enable our customers' ideas to survive and thrive, including owning outcomes, building value, joining forces, working courageously and living passionately. Our relentless pursuit of building value and doing right for our customers has been a crucial ingredient of our growth.

As of December 31, 2023, we employed 6,159 people worldwide, including 2,708 in care and services (who comprise a portion of our GoDaddy Guides), 2,259 in technology and development, 395 in marketing and advertising and 797 in general and administrative functions. In addition, GoDaddy partners with various third-party providers and vendors to provide contracted care and support services to our customers; approximately 3,500 individuals are employed with or engaged by our external partners while dedicated to GoDaddy as GoDaddy Guides. These third-party providers are primarily located in international markets, most significantly in India, the Philippines, and Malaysia. A majority of our employees are based in the U.S. and Europe. None of our U.S. employees are represented by a labor union or are party to any collective bargaining agreement in connection with his, her or their employment with us. Certain of our employees in Germany are represented by employee works councils and some other internationally based employees are represented by worker representatives in accordance with local regulations.

At GoDaddy, we strive for a workplace culture where everyone has the opportunity to thrive. We support this goal by focusing on key human capital initiatives including:

• Pay Parity.** We actively work to attract a diverse employee population and are committed to providing equitable opportunity in all aspects of employment. Since 2015, we published an annual diversity and pay parity report and, according to our analysis, we believe we paid men and women substantially the same for performing similar jobs across the company for all entities included in the analysis. In 2017, we began reporting on our pay practices across U.S.-based race and ethnic minority and non-minority employee populations and reported each year that we believe, based on such data, that we paid minorities and non-minorities substantially the same for performing similar jobs across the company.

• Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging.** Not only are we committed to increasing workforce diversity, but we launched various initiatives to further our goal of being a more diverse, inclusive and equitable workplace. We support several Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), which are employee-driven and led groups focused around common topics, identities, affinities, or interests. Our ERGs play a critical role in fostering diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging within GoDaddy. They help drive GoDaddy's vision, mission, values and strategic direction in the areas of recruitment and retention, learning and development and business/community development outreach. In addition, we actively work to eliminate unconscious bias in our company by providing training and recognizing and combating unconscious bias in our hiring, performance review and promotion processes. We also scored highly on the 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 Corporate Equality Index administered by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation. Additionally, in April 2023, our Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Aman Bhutani signed the CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion pledge, joining a coalition of more than 2,500 CEOs across the U.S. who have committed to advancing diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace.

• Learning and Professional Development.** We commit to providing fulfilling career development opportunities for our employees. We offer extensive learning opportunities to our employees spanning leadership, sales, service and technology and compliance training through e-learning, instructor-led content, video-based and blended platforms. For our GoDaddy Guides, we offer continuing education and training programs that are immersive with environments, technology, and tools that enable active learning.

• Employee Engagement.** We conduct an annual anonymous employee engagement survey, GoDaddy Voice. Approximately 80% of our employees participated in the survey in 2023. Approximately 90% of survey respondents say the employees on their team treat each other with respect. 89% say their manager supports them and models inclusive behavior. Additionally, we monitor employee responses to identify areas of opportunity and set goals and expectations for improvement to ensure employees feel connected and engaged with GoDaddy's mission, our customers and their own teams.

• Community Rewards.** Our social impact work, overseen by our Corporate Sustainability & ESG team, is an extension of our company vision and mission. Through our global volunteer and matching programs, we enable our employees to volunteer in their communities with paid time off, and we match employee donations to qualifying nonprofits of choice up to $1,500 per employee per year or country equivalent. In addition, our employees can earn funds for qualifying nonprofits they volunteer with through our volunteer rewards program.

Technology and Infrastructure

Our products, customer experiences and business systems are enabled by our technology and infrastructure to provide scalability, security and flexibility. Technology and development expenses, including those expenses related to our technology platform, were $840 million, $794 million and $706 million in 2023, 2022 and 2021, respectively. During the five years ended December 31, 2023, we invested to support our growth with $3,393 million in technology and development expenses. The growth in our technology and development expenses has been driven primarily by our focus on enhancing customer experiences through the use of software-driven products. Additionally, we offer Domain Registry and Corporate Domains solutions to our customers. We built a scalable infrastructure platform allowing us to optimize for economies of scale and enable next-generation hosting architecture for our customers, while investing in faster, denser and more efficient data centers, improved network connectivity and improved resiliency, both domestically and internationally.

We aim to provide a reliable and secure global platform and infrastructure. Our investments in technology, including engineers, patents, online security, customer privacy, reliable infrastructure and data science capabilities, enable us to innovate and deliver personalized solutions to our customers. Our API-driven technology platform is built on state-of-the-art, open source technologies like OpenStack and other large-scale, distributed systems. Additionally, our platform allows our developers to create new and enhanced products or product features assembled from common building blocks leading to faster deployment cycles. We believe our products work well together and are more valuable and easier to use together than if our customers purchased them individually from other companies and tried to integrate them. As of December 31, 2023, we had 2,259 employees in technology

and development and 368 issued patents in the U.S. and other countries covering various aspects of our product offerings. Additionally, as of December 31, 2023, we had 12 pending U.S. and international patent applications and intend to file additional patent applications in the future.

Physical Infrastructure and Management

Our physical technology infrastructure supports our products, experiences and business systems through servers located in data centers around the world. As a leading website hosting platform, we invested significantly in our peering architecture and underlying infrastructure management to handle significant Internet traffic at low bandwidth costs. We invested in the automation of common physical data center components like servers, load balancers, switches and storage, and we use open source solutions when possible to automate manual processes and thereby reduce the risk of human error and lower costs. Additionally, we leverage a common automated infrastructure based on OpenStack and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to enable next-generation services. We continue to migrate many of our non-hosting products and internal systems to AWS, which accelerated our ability to provide speed and reliability in both our product and customer experiences. These efforts and our large technology infrastructure footprint allow us to scale and provide our customers with valuable products at affordable prices.

Customer Experience and Business Systems

Our platform provides our global customers easy-to-use products, by allowing us to experiment and quickly deploy improvements incorporating our data insights. Our investments in our platform capabilities include the following:

E-commerce Platform and Application Services. We invest in the architecture and capabilities of our e-commerce platform to create an ecosystem where we can rapidly scale up or down and integrate with third-party offerings. The platform broadens our distribution channels by being extensible and allowing resellers to easily sell our products. We seek to continuously launch new and relevant applications and streamline our existing offerings to provide the best user experience to our customers.

Data Platform. Our horizontal data platform helps us be a trusted source of data about our customers and their online ideas through accurate, meaningful and easily consumable data insights, which allows us to build best-in-class, personalized experiences for our customers. Our data platform is key to helping us deepen our customer and business insights, which enable innovation through instrumentation, experimentation and analysis.

Content and Marketing Platform. Our content and marketing platforms leverage the latest technology, operational and production models that enable us to deliver customer-centric digital experiences at an accelerated pace through multiple touchpoints and channels. Our content platform and content creation processes help us realize efficiencies and scalability, which enhance our ability to drive new, high-quality products and customer experiences to market faster. We focus on driving advancements in experimentation, the speed and volume of content creation, localization and content self-service, while ensuring platform availability and performance. We also deliver new engagement marketing capabilities that improve business effectiveness and customer experiences.

Product Development

We continue to expand the ways we serve our customers to adjust to their changing needs from primarily domain name registration and hosting to a broader spectrum of offerings. Our primary website building products (Websites + Marketing, Managed WordPress and GoDaddy Airo), website security suite, email offerings (Microsoft 365), commerce products and domain aftermarket each represent significant need states that are complementary to our long-standing offerings and benefit from our strengths as a company in human-infused technology. Our key product development initiatives include:

Powering a Simple and Effortless Presence. We offer a range of solutions that help our customers publish their ideas online, including Websites + Marketing and GoDaddy Airo. Websites + Marketing combines a mobile-optimized website builder with an integrated set of marketing and e-commerce tools. We continue 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. In 2023, we launched GoDaddy Airo in the U.S. GoDaddy Airo is an AI-powered solution designed to build and help grow businesses online by delivering personalized website content, a logo, domain-based email, ready-to-use social media posts, a marketing calendar, email communications and more. We harnessed the foundational expertise we cultivated with respect to machine learning and AI to introduce multiple customer-facing capabilities in generative AI across our suite of products. The automation and content creation abilities inherent in these tools elevate the discoverability of and engagement with our products,

creating a true one-stop-shop experience. This further enhances our 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. Our business applications range from domain-specific email and email marketing to telephony services and payment tools to help our 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. In 2023, we integrated GoDaddy Conversations with Google's Business Messages, allowing entrepreneurs using Websites + Marketing plans to receive messages from consumers using Google Search and Maps. We intend to continue investing in the breadth of our product offerings to help our customers connect with their customers and run their ventures.

Delivering the Next Generation of Naming. The first generation of domain naming included a limited set of gTLDs, such as .com and .net, and ccTLDs, such as .uk and .in. Hundreds of new gTLDs were introduced in 2013 through the Expansion Program, expanding the available inventory for GoDaddy and our customers. Through GoDaddy Registry, we operate or provide back-end registry services to more than 200 TLDs. Additionally, we invested to expand the secondary market to help match buyers to sellers who already own domains. Our GoDaddy Investor mobile application helps investors watch and bid on domains at auction and stay on top of current bids from their mobile devices. We continue to invest in search, discovery and recommendation tools and transfer protocols for both primary and secondary domains. In 2023, we launched the capability for customers to provide business descriptions when searching for a domain, enabling GoDaddy to better understand intent and suggest a wide variety of creative domain and business name recommendations that suits a customer's needs.

Partnering Up. Our flexible platform also enables us to form strategic partnerships and quickly launch new products and offerings for our customers, including through partnerships such as Microsoft 365 for email. In 2023, to build on our offerings for our Independents customer segment, we expanded our partnerships to include Bask for IT support and ZenBusiness for business formations. Additionally, we have built a robust pipeline of future partnership opportunities to continue identifying value-added product and service offerings. Within Applications and Commerce, we launched our partnership with Worldpay and continued to support other banking partners including Elavon, Nexi and Evertec.

Harnessing the power of generative AI for our customers. We design our generative AI-powered tools and experiences to enhance our customers' discoverability of and engagement with the full suite of our product offerings and reduce the friction inherent in establishing their online presence and growing their businesses. With such tools, our customers can go from idea to domain to fully published website and content creation abilities in just minutes. In 2023, we introduced the following customer-facing generative AI-powered capabilities:

• GoDaddy Airo: Launched a new AI-powered solution in the U.S. designed to build and help grow businesses online by delivering personalized website content, a logo, domain-based email, ready-to-use social media posts, a marketing calendar, email communications and more.

• Instant Video: Introduced a new AI-powered feature within our GoDaddy Studio App, empowering small businesses to quickly create social media and video content, increase customer engagement and seize digital marketing and social commerce opportunities.

• Websites + Marketing: Implemented powerful generative AI tools into Websites + Marketing, helping microbusinesses run their business and manage their site through auto-generated online store product descriptions, customer service messages, and Instagram and Facebook ads. Other new features that we added to our Websites + Marketing offering include a bookings feature for multi-day events, Google and Apple Pay for full payment and deposit and additional configurations for Pay Buttons using Pay Links from different businesses and store locations.

• GoDaddy Pros: Brought AI-powered tools to GoDaddy Pros with GoDaddy's AI Assistant in the Pro Hub, using generative AI to expedite time consuming, repetitive tasks including generating suggested site content, proposals, invoicing and client communications.

Helping customers sell anything anywhere. Our commerce solutions are designed to grow with our 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 2023, we launched and upgraded the following commerce products and services:

• Payable Domains: Released Payable Domains, branded pay links that create a secure checkout page, shareable via a link, that allow anyone to begin accepting payments the moment they purchase a new U.S.-based domain name, even if they do not yet have a website or online store.

• GoDaddy Payments Canada: Launched our first international market for GoDaddy Payments with the expansion into the Canadian market, offering Canadian merchants the same low-cost payment processing and payment acceptance solutions our U.S. merchants enjoy.

• Tap to Pay on GoDaddy App: Launched Tap-to-Pay capability in the GoDaddy Mobile App, lowering the barrier for millions of small businesses to start accepting in-person, contactless payments with only an iPhone or Android phone in a seamless, low-friction sign-up experience.

• Microsoft Teams Integration: Partnered with Microsoft to introduce payment acceptance capabilities for businesses within the Microsoft Teams meeting platform.

• Other AI Tools and Resources: Released GoDaddy.AI, a free online resource for customers, which provides tips and current news on all things generative AI for small businesses, as well as the Small Business Generative AI Prompt Library, a growing catalog of ready-made prompts for small businesses to have the tools to start benefiting from generative AI. We also launched AI-powered conversational onboarding, delivering an easier method to set up a new WordPress site.

In the future we will continue to innovate in commerce solutions that are easy-to-use, allow our customers to sell anywhere and at industry-low card transaction pricing.

Marketing

We believe GoDaddy is one of the most recognized Internet brands in the U.S. with high brand awareness globally. We established this high level of brand awareness primarily through our advertising campaigns across various platforms including television commercials, print, online and billboards and supplemented these advertising campaigns with our own entrepreneurial customers and social media influencers. Over the five years ended December 31, 2023, we invested $2,053 million in marketing and advertising expenses. Our strong brand helped us attract and retain 21.0 million customers as of December 31, 2023. We intend to continue investing in our brand as we seek to further grow our total customers.

We complement our brand marketing efforts with focused and metric-driven direct response marketing to acquire new customers. We use 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 our products and traffic to our websites. As part of this effort, we regularly run campaigns simultaneously and constantly refine our media mix across our channels.

Central to our international strategy is a philosophy of scaling our product offerings and customer experience and deploying them through our global infrastructure. As of December 31, 2023, we had approximately 10.2 million customers outside of the U.S. and derived approximately 33%, 32% and 32% of our total bookings from international sales in 2023, 2022 and 2021, respectively. We built a dedicated team responsible for ensuring scaling and, when necessary, the localization of our core product offerings as well as our customer care and marketing efforts.

We have continued to expand our international employee presence and continue to expand our marketing efforts internationally. These investments enabled us to successfully launch and expand our business outside the U.S. and as of December 31, 2023, we market and sell to customers in over 200 markets around the world. We took a rigorous approach to managing the level of investment we expect to make in each geographic market we enter based on a market tier approach. We expect to continue to strategically expand internationally, growing our share and increasing penetration of the international markets we entered in recent years.

Competition

We provide cloud-based solutions enabling individuals, businesses and organizations to establish an online presence, connect with customers and manage their ventures. The market for our products and services is highly fragmented and competitive. These types of products and solutions continue to evolve, creating opportunity for new competitors to enter the market with point-solution products or address specific segments of the market. In some instances, we use commercial partnerships with companies with which we also compete. We consider the following to be a representative list of competitors we face in some of the major areas we operate in:

• With respect to our Core Platform products and services: Newfold Digital, Namecheap, Tucows, Dynadot, GMO, Cloudflare, Let's Encrypt, SEDO, Comodo, Hostinger and Identity Digital;

• With respect to our A&C products and services: Shopify, Block, BigCommerce, Stripe, PayPal, Liquid Web, SiteGround, WP Engine, Zoho, Mindbody, Toast, Yelp, OpenTable, TikTok, Meta and WeChat; and

• With respect to both our Core Platform and A&C products and services: Wix, Squarespace, Automattic, Ionos, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Alibaba and Tencent.

We believe the principal competitive factors include product capabilities meeting customer requirements, a secure, reliable and integrated technology platform, cost-effective customer acquisition, brand awareness and reputation, customer service and support and overall customer satisfaction. We believe we compete favorably with respect to each of these factors. For additional information, see "Risk Factors."

Regulation

Our 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 we do business.

ICANN. The registration of domain names is governed by ICANN, a multi-stakeholder private sector, not-for-profit corporation formed in 1998 for the express purposes of overseeing a number of Internet related tasks, including management of the Domain Name System (DNS), allocation of IP addresses, accreditation of domain name registrars and registries and the definition and coordination of policy development for all of these functions. We are accredited by ICANN as a domain name registrar and registry and thus our ability to offer domain name registration products is subject to our ongoing relationship with, and accreditation by, ICANN. The regulation of Internet domain names in the U.S. and in foreign countries is subject to change.

ccTLD Authorities. The regulation of ccTLDs is governed by national regulatory agencies of the country underlying the specific ccTLDs, such as the U.S. (.us), Colombia (.co), China (.cn), Canada (.ca) and the UK (.uk). Our ability to sell ccTLDs is dependent on our and our partners' abilities to maintain accreditation in good standing with these various international authorities.

Advertising and promotional information presented on our websites and in our products, and our other marketing and promotional activities, are subject to federal and state consumer protection laws regulating unfair and deceptive practices. U.S. federal, state and foreign legislatures have also adopted laws and regulations regulating numerous other aspects of our business. Regulations relating to the Internet, including laws governing online content, user privacy and data protection, automatic renewal laws, taxation, and liability for third-party activities, are particularly relevant to our business. A sample of such laws and regulations is discussed below.

Communications Decency Act (CDA). The CDA regulates content of material on the Internet, and provides immunity to Internet service providers and providers of interactive computer services for certain claims based on content posted by third parties. The CDA and the case law interpreting it generally provide that domain name registrars and website hosting providers cannot be liable for defamatory or obscene content posted by customers on registrars' servers unless they participate in creating or developing the content. The Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) and Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017 (FOSTA), which became effective in April 2018, amend certain portions of the CDA, which may limit the immunity previously available to us under the CDA.

Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA provides domain name registrars and website hosting providers a safe harbor from liability for third-party copyright infringement. To qualify for the safe harbor, however, registrars and website hosting providers must satisfy numerous requirements, including adopting a user policy providing for termination of service access of users who are repeat infringers, informing users of this policy and implementing the policy in a reasonable manner. In addition, registrars and website hosting providers must expeditiously remove or disable access to content upon receiving a proper notice from a copyright owner alleging infringement of its protected works. A registrar or website hosting provider failing to comply with these safe harbor requirements may be found liable for copyright infringement.

Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA). The ACPA was enacted to address piracy on the Internet by curtailing a practice known as "cybersquatting," or the bad-faith registration of a domain name identical or similar to another party's trademark, or to the name of another living person, in order to profit from that name or mark. The ACPA provides that registrars may not be held liable for damages for registration or maintenance of a domain name for another person absent a showing of the registrar's bad faith intent to profit. Registrars may, however, be held liable if their activities are deemed outside the scope of basic registrar functions.

Lanham Act. The Lanham Act governs trademarks and false advertising. Case law interpreting the Lanham Act has limited liability for many Internet service providers such as search engines and domain name registrars. Nevertheless, there is no statutory safe harbor for trademark violations comparable to the provisions of the DMCA, and we may be subject to a variety of trademark claims in the future.

Privacy and Data Protection. In the areas of personal privacy and data protection, the U.S. federal and various state and foreign governments have adopted or proposed limitations on, and requirements associated with, the collection, distribution, use, storage and security of personal information of individuals. In addition, in several jurisdictions in which we operate, data protection is more highly regulated and rigidly enforced. For example, the European Union (E.U.) has enacted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which includes stringent operational requirements for processors and controllers of E.U. personal data with broad extra-territorial effect and imposes significant penalties for non-compliance. In addition, California enacted the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in 2018, effective January 1, 2020, which was further modified by the passage of the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA). The CCPA and its associated regulations require covered companies to provide new disclosures to California consumers and afford such consumers new abilities to opt-out of certain sales and sharing of personal information for advertising and other purposes. Several other U.S. states recently have adopted or are considering laws and regulations relating to processing of personal information that apply to our business. We expect compliance with the increasing number of these laws and regulations to be more burdensome and costly for us.

Payments Regulation. Various U.S. federal, state and international laws and regulations govern the payments industry, including the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 and state money transmitter licensing laws. Our payments services may be or become subject to regulation by authorities, which would subject us to, among other things, (i) record-keeping, reporting and bonding requirements, (ii) limitations on the investment of customer funds and (iii) inspection by state and federal regulatory agencies. In order to offer retail point-of-sale solutions that connect to payment networks, retail point-of-sale providers must certify their products and services with the payment card networks, financial institutions and payment processors, as well as comply with government and telecommunications company regulations including those imposed by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and similar telecommunications authorities worldwide.

Artificial Intelligence. AI is the subject of evolving review by various governmental and regulatory agencies around the globe, including the Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and changes in laws, rules, directives and regulations governing the use of AI are evolving rapidly. For example, on October 30, 2023, the Biden administration issued an Executive Order to, among other things, establish extensive new standards for AI safety and security, and other jurisdictions may decide to adopt similar or more restrictive legislation that may render the use of such technologies challenging. Similarly, the intellectual property ownership and license rights, including copyright, surrounding AI technologies has not been fully addressed by U.S. courts or other federal or state laws or regulations. We will continue to monitor developing global AI laws and regulations and evaluate the potential implications for the operation of our business.

Laws and regulations relating to our activities are unsettled in many jurisdictions and may prove difficult or impossible to comply with in some jurisdictions. Additionally, federal, state, local and foreign governments are also considering legislative and regulatory proposals that would regulate the Internet and our activities in more and different ways than exist today. Laws and regulations in the U.S. or in foreign jurisdictions may be applied in new or different manners in pending or future litigation. Further, other existing bodies of law, including the criminal laws of various jurisdictions, may be deemed to apply to our activities, or new statutes or regulations may be adopted in the future. It is also impossible to predict whether new taxes will be imposed on our services, and depending upon the type of such taxes, whether and how we would be affected.

Intellectual Property and Proprietary Rights

Our intellectual property and proprietary rights are important to our business. We rely on a combination of trademark, patent, copyright and trade secret laws, confidentiality and access-related procedures and safeguards and contractual provisions to protect our proprietary technologies, confidential information, brands and other intellectual property.

As of December 31, 2023, we had 368 issued patents in the U.S. and other countries covering various aspects of our product offerings. Additionally, as of December 31, 2023, we had 12 pending U.S. and international patent applications and intend to file additional patent applications in the future. As of December 31, 2023, we had 583 registered and 25 pending trademarks in jurisdictions including the U.S., E.U., UK, China and Germany.

We have non-disclosure, confidentiality and license agreements with employees, contractors, customers and other third parties, which limit access to and use of our proprietary information. Though we rely in part upon these legal and contractual protections, as well as various procedural safeguards, we believe the skill and ingenuity of our employees, the functionality and

frequent enhancements to our solutions and our ability to introduce new products and features meeting the needs of our customers are more important to maintaining our competitive position in the marketplace.

We have an ongoing trademark and service mark registration program pursuant to which we register our brand names and product names, taglines and logos in the U.S. and other countries to the extent we determine appropriate and cost-effective. We also have common law rights in some unregistered trademarks that were established over years of use. In addition, we have a trademark and service mark enforcement program pursuant to which we monitor applications filed by third parties to register trademarks and service marks that may be confusingly similar to ours, as well as the use of our major brand names in social media, domain names and other Internet sites.

Corporate Information

We were incorporated in Delaware on May 28, 2014. Our principal executive offices are located at 2155 E. GoDaddy Way, Tempe, Arizona 85284, and our telephone number is (480) 505-8800.

Available Information

Our website is located at www.godaddy.com and our investor relations website is located at investors.godaddy.net. Our Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and our Proxy Statements are available through our investor relations website, free of charge, as soon as reasonably practicable after we file them with the SEC. We also provide a link to the section of the SEC's website at www.sec.gov that has all of the reports, proxy and information statements we file or furnish with the SEC.