GoDaddy builds identity standards for AI agents hitting web

Right now, when an AI agent visits a website, the site owner has no reliable way of knowing who sent it, what it is allowed to do, or whether it is acting within any defined scope. It simply arrives, does something, and leaves. That ambiguity is not a minor inconvenience. It is quickly becoming one of the more pressing structural problems facing the web, and GoDaddy is moving aggressively to address it.

The company has been running its Agent Name Service, or ANS, in production since November 2025. The system assigns AI agents a unique, human-readable name and a verifiable identity tied to a domain, using the same DNS infrastructure that has always underpinned how websites establish trust online. The logic mirrors how any legitimate website proves its identity today: through domain ownership backed by a certificate. ANS extends that same principle to agents rather than pages.

LegalZoom registered the first agent on ANS in April 2026, building a legal services integration that connects users with attorneys through a named, verified identity. That early adoption signals something important. Industries where accountability matters most are already treating agent identity as a requirement rather than a future consideration.

Since then, GoDaddy has moved on two fronts simultaneously. Its April partnership with Cloudflare wired ANS into the hosting environment, giving website owners a policy tool to allow, block, or charge AI crawlers based on verified identity rather than blanket rules. Cloudflare already processes over one billion HTTP 402 payment-required responses daily across its network, reflecting how urgently the market wants to price AI access even though no billing standard yet exists. Together, the two companies created a mechanism where a verified agent can identify itself upon arrival and receive a decision based on actual policy rather than guesswork.

The May partnership with HOL, a 30-company consortium building open standards for AI agent infrastructure, extends ANS further. Two draft specifications developed jointly address universal agent identification across both traditional web services and decentralized systems, alongside a publicly verifiable audit trail for the registry itself. That second layer means no single company controls the record of which agents exist and who operates them.

Hosting providers are already making AI crawler decisions without telling customers, and the industry is splitting badly on how to handle it. GoDaddy’s bet is that verified identity solves the problem underneath all of those decisions.