AI agents are launching at an incredibly rapid pace, with more than one billion agents projected to be built by businesses alone in the next three years. As AI agents begin communicating with one another, a major challenge arises: how can people distinguish legitimate agents from malicious ones and ensure the integrity of agent-to-agent interactions?
To help solve this high-stakes challenge, GoDaddy founded the Agent Name Service (ANS), an open standard that is the internet’s first trust layer for AI agents.
The ANS standard gives developers, companies and everyday internet users a trusted way to verify, discover and register artificial intelligence agents. ANS uses the same core infrastructure that powers today’s internet, domain names, Domain Name Service (DNS), and public key infrastructure (PKI) certificates. It requires each registered AI agent to be assigned a unique, human-readable name and a cryptographically verifiable identity. This lets agents be discovered, verified, and governed across the open web.
To learn more about the ANS Standard, visit agentnameregistry.org.
ANS in practice: GoDaddy ANS Registry
Following the standards outlined by ANS, GoDaddy launched its ANS Registry, which binds an AI agent’s identity to a domain name. This allows anyone to confirm an AI agent’s domain ownership, and for agents with extended verification, their organizational identity all helping protect people from rogue agents or imposter bots.
All AI agents registered through the GoDaddy ANS Registry earn an ANS-verified badge to help users quickly distinguish vetted agents from potentially malicious ones, aligning with GoDaddy’s broader mission to bring internet-scale trust to the growing agent ecosystem.
GoDaddy ANS Registry builds on the company’s longstanding leadership and experience in helping keep the internet safe with domain names, DNS and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates.
“AI should move the world forward without putting people at risk,” said Travis Muhlestein, GoDaddy product and AI chief technology officer. “ANS makes that possible by providing responsible builders a clear badge of trust and giving every user a quick way to see who—and what—is behind an AI agent.”
Why ANS matters
- Global standards: ANS creates a universal standard for agent identity, enabling seamless interoperability across platforms and ecosystems worldwide. The open design spec for ANS follows the W3C/DID standard and is the only naming service that can be resolved inside any browser without plug-ins.
- Accountability and transparency: Immutable transparency logs create a permanent record of each agent’s registration, renewal and revocation history, creating an audit trail for compliance and trust.
- Discovery and Adoption: A trusted registry makes it easy for users to find, evaluate, and adopt the right agents, accelerating the growth of the AI agent ecosystem.
