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.

Add a public link¶

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¶

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.

Regenerate the link¶

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

Turning off the Public link feature for your team (an admin-level setting) only hides the option from the add-channel dropdown for new channels — it doesn't revoke links you've already shared. Regenerate or delete the channel if you need to close off an existing link.

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

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 Team members can still preview an unpublished chatbot by opening the page while logged in.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¶

• Public link
• Deploying your chatbot to different channels
• Disable a channel