Google Domains: what happened, how Squarespace domains replaced it, and where to buy a domain now
Google Domains was sold to Squarespace on September 7, 2023 and migration ended July 10, 2024. What broke, what renewals cost now, and where to buy instead.
| Subject | Buying |
| Published | August 2026 |
| Length | 8 min read |
| Written by | The NameBest team |
While you read this, the console on the homepage is checking names against the registry in real time.
No card needed. Or run the console without an account at all.
Google Domains no longer exists. Squarespace acquired all of the roughly 10 million domain registrations and their customer accounts on September 7, 2023, and Google stopped selling new domains that same day. Every migrated name had moved onto Squarespace Domains by July 10, 2024. If you are trying to buy a domain from Google today, you cannot: you buy it from any other ICANN accredited registrar or from a domain marketplace instead.
People still search for Google Domains in large numbers, three years on, and the results they land on are mostly wrong or half updated. Some say it is shutting down, in the future tense. Some say Google Cloud still sells domains, which is technically true and misleading in a way that matters. So here is the complete version, with dates from Google's own documentation and Squarespace's own announcements, and a straight answer about where to go now.
What happened to Google Domains?
Google sold it. On June 15, 2023, Squarespace announced a definitive asset purchase agreement to acquire the assets of the Google Domains business, covering approximately 10 million domains spread across millions of customers. The deal closed on September 7, 2023, and Squarespace's own help documentation states it plainly: "On September 7, 2023, Squarespace acquired all domain registrations and their associated customer accounts from Google Domains."
New registrations stopped immediately on the closing date. Existing customers were not moved all at once. Migration ran in waves for the better part of a year, with accounts either created automatically at Squarespace or linked to a Squarespace login the customer already had, and the last of it completed on July 10, 2024.
Google's stated reason was focus. Domains was a small, well liked, low margin product that sat awkwardly next to Google Cloud, and it was retired the way Google retires most things in that category. It is worth naming the thing people actually lost, because the nostalgia is not irrational: Google Domains had flat pricing with no first year discount games, free WHOIS privacy, and free email forwarding, at a moment when most of the industry priced a $12 first year against a $22 renewal.
When did Google Domains shut down?
There is no single shutdown date, which is why the answers online conflict. The wind down ran across five dates, and different things stopped working on each of them.
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| June 15, 2023 | Squarespace announces a definitive agreement to buy the Google Domains assets, approximately 10 million domains |
| September 7, 2023 | Deal closes. Squarespace acquires all registrations and customer accounts. Google Domains stops selling new domains the same day |
| October 19, 2023 | Cloud Domains deprecation date. New registrations can no longer use the free Google Domains DNS zone. Import, export and transfers in are halted. Dynamic DNS and forwarding settings are frozen |
| January 22, 2024 | Shutdown date. Dynamic DNS updates stop working entirely, so affected domains keep pointing at their last known IP address. Domain and email forwarding become read only |
| July 10, 2024 | Migration completes. Every remaining domain is now managed by Squarespace Domains |
| September 7, 2024 | The twelve month price protection expires. Renewals move to Squarespace's standard rates |
The January 22, 2024 date is the one that quietly broke things for technical users. If you ran a home server or a self hosted service on Google's dynamic DNS, the update client stopped being able to push a new address. Nothing threw an error at the time. The domain simply kept resolving to whatever IP it last knew, until the ISP handed out a different one and the service went dark for reasons nobody could immediately see.
Can you still buy a domain from Google?
Not as a consumer, and the exception is narrower than it looks. Google Cloud Domains still lets you search for and register a name from inside the Google Cloud console, and Google's FAQ confirms it: "Yes, you can continue to search and register for new domains using Cloud Domains." But read the next sentence in that same document, because it is the important one. After the migration, "Squarespace Domains is the registrar for your domains managed by Cloud Domains," and Google Cloud is a reseller.
So a name bought through Cloud Domains is a Squarespace registration with a Google billing wrapper around it. The registrar of record, the one that appears in the public registration data and the one whose policies govern your name, is Squarespace. If your reason for wanting to buy from Google was that you trusted Google to hold the name, that reason no longer applies. You would be paying a reseller markup for a Squarespace registration you could buy directly.
For anyone outside Google Cloud there is nothing left at all. domains.google now sends visitors to Squarespace. There is no consumer Google registrar, and there has not been one since September 2023.
Did my renewal price go up?
Yes, for most people, and it happened quietly on a schedule. Squarespace honored Google Domains renewal pricing for twelve months after the acquisition closed. Once that protection lapsed on September 7, 2024, migrated names started renewing at Squarespace's standard rates, which are higher. Squarespace currently prices a common extension like .com at around $20 a year, against the flat $12 that Google Domains charged. We put those figures side by side with GoDaddy's in a comparison of Squarespace and GoDaddy domain pricing, including the registry wholesale floor underneath both.
Eight dollars a year on one domain is nothing. On a portfolio of thirty names it is $240 a year that appeared without a single email you would have read as a price rise, which is exactly the kind of small recurring charge that disappears into a card statement for years before anyone notices it. If you have not looked at what you are paying since 2023, that is the audit worth doing this week. Our breakdown of what domain renewal actually costs has the current numbers across the main extensions.
Worth being fair to Squarespace here: $20 for a .com is not gouging, it is roughly the market middle. GoDaddy sits higher, Porkbun and Cloudflare sit lower, and Google's $12 was subsidized by a company that did not need the margin. If you would rather not keep paying it, there are registrars that do not require a website plan attached to the registration. The complaint is not really about the price. It is that the price changed under a product people had chosen specifically because its pricing never changed.
Did anything go wrong during the migration?
One thing did, and it is worth knowing about if you still have a migrated domain sitting in an account you have never logged into. In July 2024, Squarespace disclosed a domain hijacking incident affecting a limited number of migrated domains. Attackers exploited weaknesses in how migrated accounts were set up and logged into, and used that access to change DNS records and redirect traffic. Several crypto projects were hit publicly.
The underlying weakness was structural rather than exotic. Migrated Google Domains users had accounts created for them at Squarespace, and some of those accounts existed without a password ever having been set, which left a gap in the sign in flow. If you have a domain that came across in the migration and you have not deliberately set a password and enabled two factor authentication on the Squarespace account holding it, that is the single most useful thing to do after reading this. A domain with weak account security is easier to steal than to buy, and recovering a hijacked name is far harder than protecting one. It is also worth checking that the registration record still shows you as the holder, since the registrant organization field is what determines the legal holder under ICANN policy.
Does Google Workspace email still work?
Yes. Squarespace maintained compatibility with Google Workspace through the migration, so professional email at your own domain kept working without interruption. Your Workspace subscription and your domain registration are separate products that were always billed separately, even when Google ran both; the migration moved the registration and left the mailbox alone.
What changed is where you go to edit the DNS records that make it work. MX records for a migrated domain are now managed in the Squarespace domain dashboard rather than in the Google Domains console. If you ever need to reissue a verification record or repoint mail, that is the panel to open.
Where should I buy a domain now?
Anywhere accredited, and the choice matters less than people assume for a plain registration. What you are actually shopping for is four things: the renewal price rather than the first year price, whether privacy is included or sold as an upsell, whether transfers out are handled without friction, and whether the registration lands in your own name rather than in an agency or host account. Our comparison of the main domain registrars lays out where each one sits on those four.
The bigger point is that a registrar only helps you when the name is unregistered, and roughly 401.6 million domains are already registered across all extensions. If the name you want comes back taken, a registrar search screen has nothing further to offer you, which is where most people stop and settle for a worse name. There are three routes to any given name and the search result decides which one you are on: register it if it is free, buy it from whoever holds it if it is not, or bid on it if the current owner has stopped renewing.
NameBest sits at the first of those three routes and is honest about the boundary. It generates candidates from a brief and puts every one to the registry over RDAP before you see it, so a single pass tells you which names are genuinely still unregistered, each with a labelled value estimate beside it. It is not a marketplace and runs no auctions, so the other two routes happen at venues that do hold listings, and what you take into them from here is a number of your own rather than one somebody invented. If you are already holding a name at Squarespace and simply want it somewhere else, note the timing rules first: a name cannot move registrars within 60 days of registration or within 60 days of a change of ownership, and it is worth comparing registrars on renewal price before you decide where it lands.
The short version
Google Domains was sold to Squarespace on September 7, 2023, stopped taking new registrations that day, and finished migrating on July 10, 2024. Google Cloud Domains still sells names, but as a reseller of Squarespace, so there is no meaningful sense in which you can still buy a domain from Google. Renewal prices for migrated names rose after September 7, 2024, from Google's flat $12 to roughly $20 for a .com. Google Workspace email was unaffected. If a domain of yours came across in that migration, set a real password on the Squarespace account and turn on two factor authentication, because the July 2024 hijacking incident targeted exactly the accounts nobody had logged into yet.