GoDaddy executives said the company's AI-led Airo platform is central to its strategy, with the product reaching a $50 million run rate by the end of the second quarter after a run rate was first disclosed in the first quarter. The comments came at Citi's 2026 Global TMT Conference on Tuesday, September 8, 2026, where Chief Financial Officer Mark McCaffrey and Head of Investor Relations Christie Masoner discussed the company's commercial and financial outlook. The session's Q&A referenced moderator and speaker James Michael. GoDaddy also said an investor night scheduled for December 1 will provide more detail on 2027 and beyond.
Financially, GoDaddy reaffirmed its long-term free cash flow target of $1.8 billion. Free cash flow per share grew 28% in the second quarter, the company said, while tracking above a 25% compound annual growth rate and producing a 14% free cash flow yield. Management said free cash flow to normalized EBITDA conversion is designed to be about 1:1 or slightly better. The 2026 normalized EBITDA margin target remained at 33%, and gross profit margin was reported at 63.8%. The company also cited aggressive share buybacks in the second quarter and an InvestingPro Financial Health score of 3.14 out of 5, rated as GREAT.
Commercially, GoDaddy described a $4.99 domain promotion limited to one domain per new customer, after stopping deep discounting at the top of the funnel about two years earlier. Airo uses a tiered SKU structure with monthly token allocations, allowing customers to upgrade tiers or purchase additional tokens if they reach capacity within a month. More than 70% of Airo cohort customers adopt a second product, compared with more than 50% across GoDaddy's wider customer group. About 60% of traffic is organic and direct navigation to GoDaddy. The company has more than 20 million customers, with more than half holding at least two products, and stronger retention rates are appearing in cohorts that entered after deep discounting was stopped.
Operationally, Airo Care showed initial test results improving resolution rates by about 50%. Airo has been gross margin positive since day one, the company said, by routing tasks to different models based on cost and complexity. The platform sits within GoDaddy's broader product set, including Websites + Marketing, GoDaddy Payments and DIFY, and references agentic naming and resource discovery systems, or ANS and ARD, along with DNS and large language models.
