Your Customers May Never Visit Your Website: MCP Apps, Explained
ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot can now show a business’s real tools inside the chat. What that means for a small business, and what to do first.
By John Martines · October 3, 2026 · 6 min read
An MCP App puts a working piece of a company’s product, like a booking form or a product card, right inside ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot. All three now support the same standard. Here is what changes for a small business, in the order to act on it.
Open ChatGPT or Claude today and ask it to plan a trip, draft a slide or check on a project, and something new may show up. Not a paragraph about another company's product, but a small working piece of the product itself, right in the conversation. Hotel cards you can scroll. A Canva design you can edit. An Asana timeline you can drag.
That's an MCP App. Most owners haven't heard the name, and that's fine. But it changes how customers find a business and act on what they find, so it's worth ten minutes.
MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is the standard AI assistants use to connect to other software. Until this year a connection could only hand the assistant information: a calendar entry, a file, a price. The assistant then described it back to you in text.
MCP Apps add a screen. The connected software can send a small, interactive piece of its own interface, like a form, a chart, a product card or a booking step, and the assistant shows it inside the chat. When you click something in it, the assistant knows what you clicked and can carry on from there.
How it got here:
- November 2025: the idea was proposed, built on OpenAI's Apps SDK and an open project called MCP-UI. OpenAI had already opened ChatGPT to apps in October 2025, with Booking.com, Canva, Expedia, Figma, Spotify and Zillow among the first.
- January 26, 2026: Claude turned MCP Apps on, with Amplitude, Asana, Box, Canva, Clay, Figma, Hex, monday.com and Slack on day one, for the Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans. ChatGPT, Visual Studio Code and Block's Goose support the same standard.
- July 28, 2026: MCP Apps became an official part of the MCP specification.
- September 30, 2026: Microsoft's documentation shows MCP apps running inside Microsoft 365 Copilot, through the custom agents a business can add.
So the three assistants most small businesses use all speak the same standard. A company builds one app and it can run in all of them.
Think of three steps in how people find you.
Search. Google finds your page and sends people to it. You own the experience from the first click.
AI answers. The assistant reads your page and tells people about you in its own words. Sometimes it's wrong, and often there's no link.
Apps in the chat. Your actual product shows up inside the conversation, and the customer acts on it there. Your website becomes one of the places the business happens, not the only one.
Shopping shows where this is heading, and also where it isn't yet. In January 2026 Shopify launched Agentic Storefronts, which put a merchant's products into ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google's AI Mode and Gemini from one place in the Shopify admin. OpenAI also tried letting people pay inside ChatGPT, then pulled back in March 2026: products still appear in the chat, but the purchase now usually finishes on the merchant's own site. That's the useful lesson. The finding is moving into the chat. The paying, for now, still mostly happens with you.
1. Get described accurately first. Before any app, make sure the assistants get you right. Your website should say plainly what you do, where, for whom, your hours, and any prices you're willing to publish. Then ask ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot the question a customer would ask, like "who repairs commercial ovens in my town?", and read what they say about you. Fix the source, not the chat. For most businesses this is free and it's most of the win.
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