Domain registrar and web services company GoDaddy (NYSE: GDDY) met Wall Street’s revenue expectations in Q4 CY2025, with sales up 6.8% year on year to $1.27 billion. On the other hand, next quarter’s revenue guidance of $1.26 billion was less impressive, coming in 1.4% below analysts’ estimates. Its GAAP profit of $1.80 per share was 14% above analysts’ consensus estimates.

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Company Overview

Known for its memorable Super Bowl commercials that put it on the map, GoDaddy (NYSE: GDDY) is a domain registrar and web services provider that helps entrepreneurs establish an online presence through domain registration, website building, hosting, and e-commerce tools.

Revenue Growth

Reviewing a company’s long-term sales performance reveals insights into its quality. Any business can put up a good quarter or two, but the best consistently grow over the long haul. Over the last five years, GoDaddy grew its sales at a sluggish 8.3% compounded annual growth rate. This was below our standard for the software sector and is a poor baseline for our analysis.

We at StockStory place the most emphasis on long-term growth, but within software, a half-decade historical view may miss recent innovations or disruptive industry trends. GoDaddy’s annualized revenue growth of 7.9% over the last two years aligns with its five-year trend, suggesting its demand was consistently weak.

This quarter, GoDaddy grew its revenue by 6.8% year on year, and its $1.27 billion of revenue was in line with Wall Street’s estimates. Company management is currently guiding for a 5.5% year-on-year increase in sales next quarter.

Looking further ahead, sell-side analysts expect revenue to grow 6.6% over the next 12 months, similar to its two-year rate. This projection doesn't excite us and implies its products and services will face some demand challenges.

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Annual Recurring Revenue

While reported revenue for a software company can include low-margin items like implementation fees, annual recurring revenue (ARR) is a sum of the next 12 months of contracted revenue purely from software subscriptions, or the high-margin, predictable revenue streams that make SaaS businesses so valuable.

GoDaddy’s ARR came in at $4.34 billion in Q4, and over the last four quarters, its growth was underwhelming as it averaged 7.8% year-on-year increases. This performance mirrored its total sales and suggests that increasing competition is causing challenges in securing longer-term commitments.

Customer Base

GoDaddy reported 20.42 million customers at the end of the quarter, a sequential increase of 9,000. That’s a little better than last quarter and quite a bit above the typical growth we’ve seen over the previous year. However, the increase in customers wasn’t backed by an equivalent increase in annualized recurring revenue (ARR), suggesting that GoDaddy is disproportionately winning smaller customers.

Key Takeaways from GoDaddy’s Q4 Results

It was encouraging to see GoDaddy beat analysts’ EBITDA expectations this quarter. We were also happy its annual recurring revenue narrowly outperformed Wall Street’s estimates. On the other hand, its revenue guidance for next quarter slightly missed and its full-year revenue guidance fell slightly short of Wall Street’s estimates. Overall, this was a softer quarter. The stock traded down 6.4% to $86.41 immediately after reporting.

GoDaddy’s earnings report left more to be desired. Let’s look forward to see if this quarter has created an opportunity to buy the stock. What happened in the latest quarter matters, but not as much as longer-term business quality and valuation, when deciding whether to invest in this stock. We cover that in our actionable full research report which you can read here (it’s free).