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Deploy Your Chatbot with a Public Link

A public link gives your chatbot a hosted chat page that anyone can open — no embedding or website required. See Public link for what it is and what visitors see.

Prerequisites

  • A published version of your chatbot. Visitors always reach the published version — if you haven't published one yet, they'll see a banner instead of the chat. See Create & publish versions.
  1. Navigate to the Chatbot you want to share.
  2. Click the (plus) icon and select Public link from the dropdown.
  3. Set a Welcome message and, optionally, Starter questions for the channel. These greet visitors when they open the page.
  4. Click Create.

The channel dialog then shows your link — something like https://www.openchatstudio.com/c/<token>/ — with a copy button. You can also copy it from the Copy link chip next to the channel button on the chatbot's home page.

Only one public link can be added per chatbot. If you already have one, add its welcome message and starter questions by opening the existing channel instead.

Share the link however you'd like — email, chat, a QR code, and so on. Anyone who opens it can start chatting immediately; they don't need an Open Chat Studio account.

The page shows your chatbot's name and description above the chat, always in light mode regardless of your app theme, and isn't indexed by search engines.

If a link has been shared somewhere you no longer want it to work, open the channel and click Regenerate link.

Regenerating revokes the old link immediately

The previous link stops working right away, and any conversation still open on it is ended. Anyone who wants to keep chatting needs the new link.

Turning it off

  • Disable the channel (the Enabled toggle) to pause it without losing its configuration. Visitors see a banner instead of the chat, and any conversation still open on the link is ended. Re-enable it later to bring the same link back.
  • Delete the channel to remove it and its link for good. This also ends any conversation still open on it.

See Disabling a channel for how disabling works across channels generally.

Moving off the legacy web chat

The legacy web chat is being retired in favour of the public link channel. It includes the public /start/ link, email invitations, the chat page those links open, and the full-page chat for logged-in users. Until the removal date, it keeps working. The removal date is shown in the chatbot's Share dialog and on the Invitations page.

What changes before the removal date

  • Invitations are read-only. Pending sessions are still listed and links already sent still work, but you can't create or send new invitations.
  • The Share dialog and the Invitations page show the removal date and link to this guide.
  • An old /start/ link redirects to the chatbot's public link. This happens only if the chatbot has a published version and an enabled public link.

What changes after the removal date

After the removal date, the legacy entry points are switched off with a feature flag. On the hosted service, Open Chat Studio turns it on. Self-hosted operators turn it on themselves. Once it is on, the old /start/ and invitation links return 410 Gone. The message points visitors to the chatbot's public link if it has a live one, and to this guide otherwise. Chats that visitors already started keep working, because only the entry points are switched off.

  1. Publish a version of the chatbot if it doesn't have one.
  2. Add a public link and make sure the channel is enabled.
  3. Replace the old /start/ link, or the invitation emails, with the new public link everywhere you shared it.
  4. If you used a /start/ link, open it to confirm it redirects to the new public link.

Some legacy features aren't carried over

The public link doesn't support invitations, message rating, or the end-of-chat review. Check whether your workflow depends on them before you switch.

Notifications

Team members who can add channels get an in-app notification when a chatbot still has legacy web chat visitors and no live public link. A chatbot counts as affected if it had a legacy web chat session in the last 30 days. You are notified when this is first detected, then 30, 14, 7, and 1 days before the removal date.

Self-hosted operators: the enforcement flag, the response headers, and the notification task are described in Legacy web chat retirement.

Troubleshooting

Visitors see a banner instead of the chat
Check that the channel's Enabled toggle is on and that your chatbot has a published version. Team members can still preview an unpublished chatbot by opening the page while logged in.
Visitors report the chat won't load
The page loads the chat widget from unpkg.com and its fonts and styles from cdnjs.cloudflare.com. If a visitor is on a restricted network (for example, a locked-down corporate network), ask them to check that those domains aren't blocked.
Visitors are told to try again later
Public link chat starts are rate limited per visitor IP address to prevent abuse. Ask them to wait a moment and try again.
A returning visitor doesn't see their previous conversation
This is expected — the conversation lives in that browser tab's session storage, so it ends when the tab closes. It also means a shared or public computer never hands a new visitor the previous person's conversation.

See also