The biggest hurdle to accelerate AI adoption is trust. Unlocking AI Agent adoption requires moving beyond anonymous bots that IT teams are forced to block, fearing the security risks. But what if your agents could introduce themselves with a “digital handshake”?
By integrating GoDaddy’s Agent Name Service (ANS) with Anypoint API Manager (APIM), MuleSoft provides 100% cryptographic certainty of agent identity. This enables your agents to be instantly distinguishable from malicious bots, enabling digital workforce scaling without compromising security or manual oversight.
What is GoDaddy Agent Name Service (ANS)?
Launched as a major initiative in late 2025. Think of GoDaddy Agent Name Service as a DNS for AI agents. Just as the Domain Name System (DNS) gives websites human-readable addresses, ANS provides a unique, verified identity for AI agents so they can be discovered and trusted across the internet.
The digital passport for AI agents
As AI agents transition from experimental pilots to enterprise-wide deployment, the risks of agent sprawl and agent identity spoofing are growing. A legitimate purchasing AI agent and a malicious bot look identical on the wire. IT teams can’t audit either, and end up blocking both.
To solve this problem and unblock AI agent adoption, Agent Fabric has integrated with GoDaddy’s Agent Name Service (ANS), creating a standardized way to verify who or what is accessing your data. By leveraging the existing DNS framework, organizations can now assign AI agents a verified digital passport linked to their domain. This allows IT teams to automatically discover, authenticate, and govern agents with cryptographic certainty, ensuring that only trusted AI can use your APIs or access the data.
Seamless agent registration in Anypoint APIM
We launched Agent Scanners to automatically catalog agents within the MuleSoft Agent Registry. To ensure the agents you discover are legitimate, we integrated GoDaddy’s Agent Name Service (ANS) with Agent Scanners.
To further solidify this foundation of trust, we have integrated GoDaddy ANS Registration directly into the Anypoint API Manager (APIM) workflow, ensuring your agents are fully verified and certified from the start. This launch features a trust-first architecture with custom domains and private spaces prioritized over shared cloudhub.io domains.
By moving away from shared environments, we are effectively eliminating the risk of cross-tenant phishing and malicious agent spoofing. This ensures that the GoDaddy Agent Name Service remains an exclusive, secure ecosystem where only verified customer domains can establish their identity.
Key benefits
| Verification and identification | Eliminate spoofing: Because registration is tied to domain ownership, a malicious actor cannot impersonate your brand. If they don’t own your DNS, they can’t get a verified badge for your domain |
| Cryptographic certainty: Each registered agent receives an X.509 identity certificate. This certificate allows systems to mathematically prove an agent’s identity, ensuring secure interactions | |
| Publisher transparency: It links the agent to a clear, accountable owner. This visibility is essential for compliance and risk management teams who need to know the who and where of every AI interaction | |
| Global discovery and interoperability | Internet scale reach: By using the Agent Name System (ANS), your agent becomes discoverable globally without needing a proprietary platform. Any system can look up your agent’s identity using standard DNS queries |
| Standardized naming: Agents get a human-readable, structured address. This makes it easy for other agents and developers to find and connect to your agents | |
| Seamless integration: Within the MuleSoft ecosystem, Agent Scanners can automatically pull these verified agents from GoDaddy into your private Anypoint Exchange, accelerating your development speed |
Real world use case
The challenge: A global logistics provider launched a fleet of AI procurement agents to automate spot-buying for shipping containers. But their partners, major ocean carriers, blocked the agents’ access. The carriers couldn’t distinguish the logistics provider’s legitimate AI agents from malicious scraping bots attempting to manipulate market pricing. Without a way to prove who the agent is and who owns it, the automation project stalled.
The solution: Using Anypoint API Manager, the logistics provider registered their procurement agents with GoDaddy ANS.
- Domain anchoring: They linked each agent to their official corporate domain: procurement.global-logistics.com
- Verification: By passing the ACME DNS challenge, they provided cryptographic proof of ownership
- The “secret handshake”: Each agent was issued an X.509 Identity Certificate, a tamper-proof digital ID
Where this fits in the Anypoint architecture
Agent identity verification is integrated directly into the Anypoint Platform control and runtime planes:
- API Manager: API Developers can now register domain-hosted agents directly with GoDaddy ANS from within APIM
- Automatic verification: Agents achieve verified status immediately upon registration
- Anypoint Exchange: Verification status is synced and visible across both APIM and Anypoint Exchange
5 steps to verify your agent’s identity
Verifying your agent’s identity with GoDaddy is now built directly into the Flex Gateway deployment workflow within APIM.
- Complete all preliminary steps are before initiating agent registration within Anypoint API Manager (APIM)
- Within Anypoint API Manager (APIM), choose the AI agent or agent broker you want to certify
- During the deployment step, choose to register with GoDaddy ANS. This is where you’ll define your Customer Endpoint – a unique, global address for your agent
- Connect your accounts by entering your GoDaddy API Key and Secret
- As part of the verification process, you will prove the domain ownership. Update your DNS records with the specific challenge questions provided by GoDaddy
Your agent’s identity certificate
Once DNS validation is complete, your agent’s status changes to Active, and a unique Identity Certificate is issued within APIM. This certificate serves as the essential foundation for Agent-to-Agent (A2A) communication, providing the cryptographic proof required for your agent to safely interact with other verified agents across the open web.
“Agent identity needs to be anchored to infrastructure the whole internet trusts, and anyone should be able to verify it without asking permission from a specific platform. We built the Agent Name Service on DNS and X.509 certificates because that infrastructure exists and billions of systems already know how to check it. MuleSoft registering their agents through ANS confirms the approach.”
– Scott Courtney VP, Engineering at GoDaddy
Empowering an open, verified, agentic future
By integrating GoDaddy ANS registration directly into the Anypoint API Manager workflow, we are removing the friction between building an agent and trusting one. This automation ensures that identity is never an afterthought, but rather a native part of the deployment lifecycle. As you scale your digital workforce, this integration ensures that every agent carrying your brand also carries a verified proof of ownership.
While GoDaddy ANS cryptographically verifies the agent itself (the “who”), MuleSoft Trusted Agent Identity ensures that the agent operates with the correct permissions on behalf of a user (the “on behalf of”) and that its actions are fully audited (the “what”). Together, these capabilities provide the comprehensive, enterprise-grade security posture your business demands when agents interact with your data.
We’re moving beyond a world of anonymous scripts toward an ecosystem of verified, autonomous collaborators that can safely transact and interact across the open web.
Verify and certify your first agent by registering through API Manager
Ready to secure your ecosystem? If you are ready to eliminate anonymous scripts and move toward a verified environment, take these steps to get started:
Make sure to watch the demo video to see MuleSoft and GoDaddy ANS in action:
