What is ChatGPT Sites and How to Use It (3 Killer Use Cases)

ChatGPT Sites is OpenAI's site builder inside ChatGPT: you describe what you want, it builds the thing, and it hands back a live link you can point your own domain at. I've built three things with it so far: a landing page that now takes our community sign-ups, a reporting dashboard wired to our real numbers, and a small web app with logins and a database behind it. Here's what each one took, what came back, and the limitations that'll decide whether ChatGPT Sites is any use to you, before you lose a weekend finding out.

How to use ChatGPT Sites, and who can use it

ChatGPT Sites is part of ChatGPT Work, OpenAI's agent in the ChatGPT desktop app. Use the desktop app rather than the browser for this, because ChatGPT Sites exists on the web version too but the feature set there is noticeably thinner.

Once ChatGPT Work is installed you get a Sites section in the left sidebar, which is where you manage the sites you've already built. To make a new one, open a fresh chat, check that ChatGPT Work mode is selected, type @ and pick Sites from the list, then describe what you want.

Two things are worth knowing before you start, because they shape everything below. ChatGPT Sites is in public beta, meaning OpenAI has released it while it's still changing, and it's available on paid plans only: Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Education. It also can't process payments, and that's a firm rule from OpenAI rather than a gap waiting to be filled.

Use case 1: a landing page that takes real sign-ups

This one solved a problem I actually had. The default sign-up page for our free community runs on a platform we can't customise, so someone landing there sees a box for their email, then a name and password field, and nothing explaining why they should bother.

I asked for a production-ready single-page landing page. What came back had far less to do with the wording of my prompt than with what was already sitting in the project folder, so it's worth being precise about what I put there.

The brief, written out as a file: the behaviour I wanted when someone enters an email, then the full page structure. A hero, the main benefit of joining, the other things inside the community, a credibility strip, sections introducing me and my co-founders, an FAQ, and a second call to action for the B2B training offer.

The assets: client logos for the testimonials, our fonts, photographs of the three of us, the 9x logo, and our design style guide.

That's the trick, and it separates the two outcomes people tend to get from these tools. A vague prompt produces a generic page, whereas a brief plus your real assets produces something that looks like it belongs to you.

What came back opened on "Learn AI live every week" with an email field under it, and it had pulled our next live workshop dynamically from Circle, the platform we run the community on, so the page showed a real upcoming event rather than a placeholder date. When I tested the sign-up flow, entering an email took me straight to step two on the community platform.

Attaching your own domain

Every site is hosted at a chatgpt.site address by default, which is fine for a prototype and obviously wrong for anything a customer sees. In the site's settings you can attach a domain of your own, which is how this page ends up at join.go9x.com. I pointed a domain I already owned at it, and that was the deployment process in full.

If your business site is simple enough, ChatGPT Sites could reasonably be all of it. For a marketing team, campaign and event pages are the more obvious fit, because the value here is getting a page live the same afternoon you decided you needed one.

Use case 2: a reporting dashboard that pulls live numbers

The second build is the one I'd start with if you want to prove the value of ChatGPT Sites to somebody else, because the output looks like something that normally takes a team.

I searched Google Images for a YouTube analytics dashboard, found a layout covering most of the metrics I care about, and gave ChatGPT the screenshot. The ask: recreate this, but pull live numbers from our YouTube channel and from BigQuery, the Google data warehouse where the rest of our data sits.

Alongside the ChatGPT Sites tag I used the data analytics plugin, with BigQuery wired in through a connector, which is a prebuilt link between the assistant and an outside system so it can read from that system directly. I also gave it a short instruction file we'd written that tells it how to pull our channel figures, the kind of reusable instruction set that gets called a skill.

Back came the dashboard, from that one prompt and a screenshot: headline metrics across the top, graphs for views, average view duration and total watch time, subscriber tracking, and a per-video breakdown of the last 30 days.

I used to work with BI teams constantly, and as a non-technical marketer there was no way I was building something like this myself. I'd file a ticket, wait a couple of weeks because they were fielding requests from every other department too, then repeat the exchange the next time I wanted a column changed.

Who can see the site: three sharing settings

A dashboard means internal numbers sitting on a hosted page, so the sharing controls do real work here. Every site has a share toggle with three options.

Only those invited lets you add people individually. Anyone in this workspace with the link covers everyone inside your company's ChatGPT workspace, which is the right setting for a report the company should be able to see. Anyone on the internet is for public pages like the landing page above.

In practice that lets some dashboards reach everyone in the workspace while others stay with the management team, without you maintaining two versions of the same report.

Use case 3: a web app with logins and a database

The third build is where ChatGPT Sites stopped behaving like a website builder.

I asked for an expense management tool: upload photos of receipts, have AI pull out the fields my accountant needs, save everything per user so each person only sees their own data, keep the original images, and let me export the lot to a CSV file.

It built what it called a "receipt inbox" and flagged the one step needed to make it work, which was adding my OpenAI API key so it could read the images. That key runs on pay-as-you-go API credit rather than on your ChatGPT subscription, so it's billed separately. If that's new to you, here's how to get one and what it costs.

I gave no direction at all on styling, which is fine when you're prototyping a function rather than shipping a product. Logged in on desktop with two receipts already uploaded, I switched to my phone, found the same app and the same data waiting there, photographed a third receipt, and watched the fields come back extracted. Refreshing the desktop showed that third receipt sitting alongside the others, which told me the data was living somewhere real rather than in one browser.

The database, environment variables and analytics behind a site

A site's settings have three tabs: Settings, Analytics and Database. Because this build has logins, the database holds a users table and a receipts table with the uploaded rows in it, and you can open both and look at the contents.

There are also environment variables, which are values the app reads while it runs without them being written into the source, and that's the part that made me trust it with a key. Apps built quickly by prompting an AI often end up with API keys sitting in the code itself, which is exactly what OpenAI's own key safety guidance warns against. Here you add the key as a variable and toggle it as a secret, alongside non-secret variables like which model the app should use.

Every site also gets built-in analytics: unique visitors, page views, and which pages people reach.

Three limitations to check before you start

1. Paid plans only. ChatGPT Sites is in public beta on Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Education. It isn't available on Free or Go.

2. No payment processing. ChatGPT can't take payments, and OpenAI treats that as a rule rather than a feature it hasn't got round to yet. ChatGPT Sites isn't a Shopify replacement, so anything ending in a checkout has to live somewhere else.

3. Sign-in is ChatGPT only. The one authentication option is "sign in with ChatGPT". On my expense tool, signing out and back in redirects to a ChatGPT login, which means every person who uses your app needs a ChatGPT account of their own. For an internal tool that's often fine, and for anything customer-facing it's usually fatal.

That third limitation decided most of what I'd use ChatGPT Sites for, and it's why I'd point you at internal tools first. OpenAI's own documentation says much the same: a site suits focused internal tool pages, dashboards or calculators, while a more complex product may still need a separate engineering project.

What ChatGPT Sites is good and bad at

On the evidence of three builds, ChatGPT Sites is strongest for internal tools and reporting, where the ChatGPT-login requirement works in your favour rather than against you, because your colleagues already have accounts and you get access control without building any.

It's good for simple public pages where you own the content and want it live today, like our community sign-up. If you work in Claude rather than ChatGPT, artifacts cover some of the same ground, built through Claude's own code execution environment, though without the hosting or the custom domain.

It's weak for anything customer-facing that needs its own accounts, anything taking money, and anything complex enough to deserve a proper engineering project.

If you sit in marketing, ops or finance and you've spent time waiting in a queue for a dashboard or an internal page, that queue may have just become optional. It's the same shift McKinsey identified in the companies getting real value from AI: they redesign the workflow instead of speeding up the old one. That's a smaller claim than "changed web design forever", and it's the one I can stand behind after three builds.

Common questions

Is ChatGPT Sites free? No. It's in public beta on paid plans: Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Education.

Can I use my own domain? Yes. ChatGPT Sites hosts every site at a chatgpt.site address by default, and you can attach a custom domain in the site's settings.

Can ChatGPT Sites take payments? No. OpenAI doesn't permit payment processing on ChatGPT Sites.

Can people use my site without a ChatGPT account? For a public page with no login, yes. If your site uses accounts, every user needs to sign in with ChatGPT, because that's the only option.

Can it build a real web app, not just a page? Yes. A ChatGPT Sites build can include a database and per-user logins, as the expense tool shows. Complex products still need proper engineering.

Where do API keys go? Into the site's environment variables, toggled as secrets, rather than into the code.