GoDaddy updates its Universal Terms — and a single line is freaking out domain owners

GoDaddy quietly updated its Universal Terms of Service on February 2, 2026, and one line in particular is making some personal domain owners pretty uneasy.

The line reads: “Our Services are not intended for private, personal or household use.” It’s sitting at the end of Section 1, and most people would have scrolled right past it — until domain attorney John Berryhill posted about it on X, telling anyone using GoDaddy for personal email, a hobby site, or family use to get their domain out of there. Fast.

Bill Hartzer, a well-known voice in the SEO and domain world, soon backed that up with his own post pointing out the same clause. Same takeaway: if your site is personal, private, or family-related, it might be time to look at moving.

So what’s actually going on here? The updated terms now treat every single GoDaddy user as a “business customer” with no carve-outs. Freelancers, hobbyists, bloggers, or someone who registered a domain just so nobody else could grab their name — all business customers now.

As MonstaDomains explains in their breakdown, this is a problem because a lot of consumer protection laws apply to individuals, not businesses. Reclassifying everyone as a business could mean those protections no longer apply.

There’s also a clause saying the “business customer” definition “prevails over any conflicting or inconsistent terms” in any GoDaddy agreement. Whatever else their docs say, this takes priority. That’s a significant thing to add to a Terms update that got almost no announcement.

GoDaddy hasn’t made any public statement about this yet. And the terms say that just continuing to use GoDaddy after the update counts as acceptance — so if you’ve logged in since February 2, you’ve technically agreed.

Nobody knows yet if GoDaddy will actually use this language to act against personal users. But people who read contracts for a living are raising flags, and that’s worth paying attention to. The full updated terms are on GoDaddy’s legal agreements page. If you’re looking to transfer, Namecheap, Cloudflare Registrar, and Porkbun are popular options that serve personal domain owners just fine.