Squarespace announced on June 15 that it has agreed to buy assets of Google’s domain-registration business for $180 million. The purchase would bring roughly 10 million domain names into a business that also sells website-building and ecommerce tools. Google Domains would wind down after a transition period.
Photo: Anthony Quintano, “Google at the 2012 Democratic National Convention North Carolina”. CC BY 2.0. Resized and cropped. Historical company display from 2012, not a photograph of the June 2023 agreement.
The purchase price appears in Squarespace’s same-day SEC filing. Squarespace expects the transaction to close in the third quarter of 2023, subject to regulatory approvals and other closing conditions. Customers haven’t been transferred simply because the deal has been announced.
The domain name is only one part of a website
The filing describes the assets as including customer domain-name registrations for which Google acts as registrar or reseller. That distinction matters: a registered address, the DNS records directing visitors and email, and the servers hosting a website are separate parts of an online business. Acquiring the registrations doesn’t, by itself, turn the websites using those addresses into Squarespace websites.
Squarespace’s announcement makes the commercial opportunity clear. It plans to offer incentives for Google Domains customers to buy its website tools and other services. Those potential purchases would come on top of the domain business being acquired.
The roughly 10 million figure counts domains, spread across millions of customers. It shouldn’t be read as 10 million separate people or 10 million paid website subscriptions. A customer can hold several addresses, including names that don’t have a live website.
A renewal-price commitment, with a defined starting point
Squarespace says it will preserve existing Google Domains customers’ renewal prices for at least 12 months after the transaction closes. That clock starts at closing, rather than at the June 15 announcement. The commitment sets a minimum period of protection; it doesn’t establish permanent renewal prices or announce what customers will pay afterward.
The company also says it will use Google’s infrastructure during the migration. The announcement doesn’t provide a customer-by-customer transfer schedule or promise that every existing feature will remain unchanged indefinitely. Its expectation that most financial benefits will arrive in 2024 and beyond is a business forecast, not a migration deadline.
The Workspace arrangement has a specific scope
Squarespace already resells Google Workspace. Once the deal closes, it will become the exclusive domain provider for customers who buy a domain together with a Workspace subscription directly from Google, for at least three years. It will also handle billing and support for Workspace customers who signed up through Google Domains.
That agreement concerns a particular sales channel. It doesn’t say that every Workspace customer must move their existing domain to Squarespace, or that Google is selling Workspace itself.
The proposed deal would also change the registrar market. In its June 15 report, Domain Name Wire places Google fifth among registrars by the number of .com domains it manages, with .com accounting for more than half of its domain portfolio. Squarespace is buying an established registration business as well as a way to reach potential website customers. How many of those customers take up its other products remains an open question.
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