About a year after ChatGPT launched, people started asking me whether companies would still need websites. My answer was always yes. One reason is simple: the models have to get their information from somewhere, and much of it comes from what companies publish about themselves. The other is that even if ChatGPT became our main portal to the internet, it wouldn’t stay a chat box. It would grow into the same kind of rich, immersive experience our websites give us now.
The early web was pure text. It was great for sharing research papers. Then commerce showed up, then advertising, and thirty years later we have the multimodal internet we live in now. Every step was driven by the same thing: someone wanting your attention, and someone else willing to pay for it.
Chat is at the text stage right now, and it’s already moving. This week OpenAI launched Intelligent UI alongside GPT-6. ChatGPT now answers with charts, buttons, forms and small working tools, generated for the question in front of it. The same week, it announced image-based ads inside ChatGPT responses. Generated interfaces are here, and so is the revenue model. From where I sit, this only resolves a few ways.
Potential futures
- One lab becomes the new AOL. It owns the portal. You work within its rules, its design constraints and the tools it releases, and you still fight your competitors for attention inside its walls.
- We design for agents. We take what’s in our heads and our systems, make it available to agents, and give them instructions so we’re presented the way we want.
- Some hybrid of the two. Part of a brand’s presence is built for agents and part for people, because the landscape stays fragmented.
Every one of those futures has someone paying to be seen.
There’s a version of this future some people quietly assume, where you ask for running shoes and the assistant just has Nike’s shoes, perfectly presented. But Sam Altman isn’t sneaking into Nike’s warehouse at night to photograph inventory. Nike supplies that content, on its own terms, and it isn’t handing its product pipeline to a platform on faith.
The other thing that fantasy misses is people. Businesses don’t accept looking the same as their competitors. When a big brand sits down with a platform, someone on the brand side eventually asks, “Could we do this?” The platform wants the deal, so it bends a rule and lets that brand stand out. Not every time, but often enough. That’s how every interface so far has evolved: brands want to stand out, audiences want relevance, and the platform in the middle gets paid to connect them.
What to do now
So what should a business be doing while all of this is still taking shape?
Not betting on one future. None of us knows which one wins, and the answer may change every six months. What makes sense now is building for agents and people at once: take agent traffic seriously and structure your information for it, while you keep designing the customer journey for humans. That work rests on how clear you are about yourself:
- What you stand for. If it isn’t clear to a person who you’re for and why you’re different, it’ll be even less clear to an agent assembling an answer about you.
- How complete and organized your information is. Is it in one place, structured, and actually available, or scattered across a CMS, a few PDFs and someone’s head?
- How clear your brand and design system are. When an interface gets generated in the moment, your rules are the only part of you that shows up intact.
- How consistently you say it. Your message has to hold up on your site, in an agent’s answer and inside a generated interface. Interfaces will keep changing; a sharp, consistent message survives the translation.
That’s positioning work, and it was valuable before any of this. Now it’s also what makes you legible to whatever comes next.
These technologies won’t be shaped by what’s possible. They’ll be shaped by what’s viable. Getting clear on who you are pays off in every future.
Sources
- TechCrunch: ChatGPT is getting a lot more visual with the launch of a new interface (opens in a new tab) (Intelligent UI launch, Oct 7, 2026)
- Gizmodo: OpenAI wants ChatGPT to stop looking like a chatbot (opens in a new tab) (image-based ads announcement)
Written by
Micah Slavens
Principal, Lift
