How A/B Testing Fuels Innovation at GoDaddy

(Editor's note: This post is the third in a four part series that discusses experimentation at GoDaddy. You can read part one here and part two here.)

Innovation isn't born from a single stroke of genius. It's built, test by test, insight by insight, until something remarkable takes shape.

In part one, we shared how GoDaddy shifted from opinion to evidence. In part two, we showed how experimentation became a unifying force across teams. Now, in part three, we explore how A/B testing fuels innovation, helping us take bolder bets and turn sparks into products that stick.

Innovation challenges

At GoDaddy, before experimentation became a habit, innovation often ran into familiar roadblocks:

• Fear of failure and the reputational risk of getting it wrong
• Long development cycles that locked teams into unvalidated ideas
• High stakes that pushed teams toward safe, incremental changes rather than bold bets

These barriers slowed exploration of new ideas and pivots away from failed assumptions. To address this, our organization uses the Zone to Win model, which divides operations into four distinct zones, each with its own management priorities.

The following diagram illustrates how the zones align with different types of innovation and performance:

For example, the Incubation Zone nurtures emerging opportunities and experimentation, making it well-suited for A/B testing and piloting new ideas (big swings). For us, Airo® was that example. It was incubated through experiments that turned a simple domain into an instant online presence.

In contrast, the Productivity Zone emphasizes efficiency and scalability. Once Airo gained traction, experiments shifted to optimizing task speed and adoption (incremental improvements) that ensured reliability at scale. The same A/B testing framework applied, but the strategic outcome was different.

Culture Shift

A culture of experimentation reframes those challenges. Instead of treating innovation as one big gamble, A/B testing breaks bold ideas into a series of learnable practices:

• Turn unexpected outcomes into insights that fuel innovation
• Use rapid, iterative A/B tests to replace slow, high-stakes launches
• Make each test a safe environment to explore

This shift gave GoDaddy teams the freedom to think bigger while reducing the risks that once held them back.

Innovation Through Iteration

Bold products rarely arrive fully formed. They’re shaped by many small tests that add clarity, remove friction, and reveal what truly resonates.

From prompt to presence with Airo

Airo helps entrepreneurs go from idea to online in minutes, suggesting domains, generating logos and starter websites, drafting social posts and ads, and even helping U.S. customers register an LLC. Businesses using GoDaddy AI tools have reported 28% more sales.

For our teams, Airo has also served as a sandbox for rapid learning across the entire customer journey, helping them: validate business ideas, find the perfect domain name, build full-stack websites/apps, guide marketing and growth initiatives, communicate with their customers, and troubleshoot.

For example, one of our A/B experiments showed that identifying customers with a propensity for WordPress during Airo onboarding and offering them a WordPress site drove a 35% lift in Managed WordPress conversions for that user segment. This drives innovation by showing how data-driven onboarding can uncover new opportunities, better match solutions to customer intent, and fuel continuous improvements across the product journey.

LLM-powered domain discovery

Choosing the right name is both emotional and complex. GoDaddy's Generative AI Domain Search integrates LLMs with a massive vector database of hundreds of millions of names, balancing relevancy and diversity so customers see options that are both available and inspiring.

“Generative AI brings the human touch to our domain search — like chatting with an expert who instantly gets what you're after. We've long known that customers who talk to our agents find names they love more often. Now, AI lets us deliver that same experience instantly, for everyone.”
— Jyothi Prakash Trishuleshwar, Product Director, GoDaddy

The Venture Forward 2024 survey found that 44% of microbusinesses believe GenAI helps them compete with larger businesses. For our teams, this opens the door to experiments with ranking strategies, acceptance cues, and query handling that measure not just click-through but the quality of customer choices.

For example, a different A/B experiment showed that personalized Generative AI increases relevance and improves the customer journey, driving ~17.8% more domains purchased compared to the baseline user segment. This shows how AI-driven personalization makes our customers' choices more relevant and helps them succeed faster.

Turning a domain into a checkout

Payable Domains reimagine what a domain can do by letting customers accept payments through a branded “pay” link almost immediately after purchase, with no website required. Entrepreneurs can share Payable Domains via text, QR code, or social media.

For example, another A/B experiment showed that adding live preview to Payable Domains drove a 5% increase in activation. This illustrates how small but thoughtful product innovations, like giving customers immediate visibility into what they’re creating, can remove friction and accelerate adoption.

Empowering Bold Ideas

A/B testing not only helps us refine existing products, it encourages us to pursue ideas that once might have felt out of reach.

Safety breeds courage

By containing risk, experiments give teams the freedom to try. Instead of debating in the abstract, we turn “too risky” into “let’s test it.” That simple reframing unlocks creativity that might otherwise remain bottled up.

For example, rolling out changes as a controlled experiment lets the team de-risk the move while using guardrails to monitor conversion, revenue, and other customer success metrics. If it succeeds, the payoff is big; if not, we gain valuable insights into why.

Leadership’s role

Leaders at GoDaddy champion curiosity over certainty. We’ve invested not only in tools but in habits that normalize learning and make experimentation the expected path to progress.

“We don’t debate the future—we experiment our way into it. Evidence beats opinion, every time.”
— Travis Muhlestein, Product and AI CTO, GoDaddy

Leaders emphasize that outcomes aren’t about wins and losses—they’re about insights. This mindset, reinforced from the top, creates psychological safety across teams and makes bold thinking a natural part of our culture.

Learning from unexpected outcomes

There are no “failed” experiments, only answers to questions we needed to ask. Sometimes the lesson eclipses the original goal. This mindset treats every outcome as a data point, not a verdict. Teams become eager to ask "why," and that curiosity is fertile ground for innovation.

Systems that Support Innovation

Innovation at scale isn’t just about brave ideas, it’s about reliable systems that make creativity easy to try.

Tools and templates

GoDaddy's in-house experimentation platform Hivemind standardizes configuration, randomization, and analysis so teams can focus on learning, not logistics. For example, the Hivemind platform requires experimenters to categorize scorecard metrics into three distinct groups before launching an A/B/n experiment:

Platform features were intentionally designed to influence culture, guiding good habits and discouraging weak tests—proof that tooling can shape behavior for the better.

From friction to flow

Playbooks, post-rollout analysis, and shared learning spaces reduce reinvention and help insights travel. For example, teams across GoDaddy can instantly access any ongoing experiment to understand its setup and derive insights from the outcomes:

Enhancements such as a gamified quality scoring system (awarding Bronze through Platinum badges) nudge teams toward higher-quality experiments without slowing them down.

Innovation on repeat

The more we embed experimentation into our processes, the easier it becomes to turn sparks into scalable outcomes. An A/B experimentation cycle illustrates how each test feeds into the next, creating a self-reinforcing loop of innovation:

This flywheel effect compounds over time, ensuring that every test makes the next one stronger.

Conclusion

A/B testing has evolved from a validation tool to an innovation engine that empowers teams to explore bold ideas with confidence. By breaking barriers, reframing failure, and scaling learning, we’ve built a system where creativity and customer impact go hand in hand.

Innovation isn’t magic—it’s a habit. Build it, nurture it, and watch your boldest ideas take flight. At GoDaddy, we’ve discovered that the most innovative teams aren’t the ones with the most creative people, they’re the ones with the best learning systems.

In our final article, we'll explore how to scale experimentation so every team, everywhere, can innovate with confidence. Stay tuned!