Your homepage is about to become irrelevant

For 25 years, websites have been the front door to your business. Every funnel, every campaign, every dollar spent on SEO was designed to pull people in.

OpenAI's ChatGPT App SDK flipped that model inside out.

Now the conversation is the front door. And most businesses aren't ready.

What the SDK does

The ChatGPT App SDK lets brands build interactive experiences that run inside ChatGPT conversations. Users don't visit your website anymore. They complete entire transactions without leaving the chat.

Say you need a vet for your dog tomorrow. ChatGPT calls your clinic's app, checks availability, and books the appointment. No landing pages, no forms, no friction.

Shopping for a rain jacket under $200? A retail brand's app surfaces in the conversation with options that ship today.

Search is being replaced by conversation. And ChatGPT's 800 million users represent the first major platform where this shift is happening at scale.

Partners like Zillow, Canva, Spotify, and Expedia already built apps that deliver property listings, design tools, playlists, and booking flows inside chat. That's where users are. That's where brands need to be.

Why this matters for your business

When buying happens through conversation, the value moves upstream.

It's no longer about who designs the prettiest website. It's about who owns the data infrastructure that powers AI interactions. Digital marketing used to mean driving people to your site. Now it means being where the conversation is.

Your product database, appointment system, inventory feed… if ChatGPT can't parse it, you don't exist in this ecosystem. That's not hyperbole. That's the new cost of entry.

For mid-market companies, this shift creates two paths:

Path 1: Keep optimizing for pageviews and time-on-site while your competitors build presence where customer behavior is moving.

Path 2: Restructure your digital foundation now so you can participate in conversational commerce when it scales.

Most will choose Path 1 because it feels safe. But the adoption curve is steep. ChatGPT isn't another channel you add to your marketing mix. It's a new interface layer.

What needs to happen

Clean your data. Your entire business needs to be machine-readable. APIs, structured schemas, standardized taxonomies. If an AI can't understand your offerings, it can't represent you.

Design for intent, not pages. Traditional UX maps buttons and flows. Conversation UX maps intention. When someone says "I need help with my order," what happens next? You need response trees, tone guidelines, escalation logic—interface design without screens.

Build working prototypes. Your clients won't understand this until they see it. Start with small modules: booking flows, product configurators, service requests. Test what these interactions feel like.

Rethink your metrics. Pageviews and CTR mean nothing in a chat interface. The new KPIs are conversation completion rate, task success, and conversion from dialogue to transaction.

The risk of waiting

Brands ignored mobile. They were slow to social commerce. They missed voice.

This feels different because behavior is shifting, not just devices. People aren't migrating to a new gadget; they're changing how they interact with businesses.

We've seen early research from ManyOne showing that brands treating this as an experiment now will own customer relationships in conversational contexts, while competitors are still figuring out the basics.

The window for first-mover advantage is narrow. Once customer expectations solidify around conversational experiences, the cost of entry goes up.

What we're doing about it

At Scale, we're turning our focus toward four things:

Structured data foundations that make client businesses readable by AI. This means auditing existing systems, cleaning taxonomies, and building APIs that feed conversational experiences.

Conversation design frameworks that translate brand voice into chat interactions. How does a hospitality brand respond differently than a pet care company when someone asks for help?

Ready-to-deploy chat modules that plug into ChatGPT and other AI platforms adopting the Model Context Protocol standard. Build once, deploy across the AI ecosystem.

Optimizing the website concept to ensure it remains the center of brand truth and expertise. Websites are not going away (yet), but they will be pivotal for defining who we are as companies, as people, from which everything else pulls.

Scaling has traditionally meant adding people or raising prices. This model offers a third path: platform leverage. Your brand won't be a destination people visit. It'll be a presence people talk to.

That conversation is already happening. The question is whether you're in it.

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OpenGraph photo by Clint Adair on Unsplash