Do you still need a website, or is Instagram enough?

Sometimes, for a while. If you are testing an idea, or your customers already find you on Instagram and book by message, Instagram and a link-in-bio page can genuinely be enough. For most businesses, though, it is a risky place to keep everything, for three reasons: you do not own the account, Instagram decides who sees each post, and the search crawlers most AI assistants use are told to keep out of Instagram.

This is the first piece in a series on things small businesses are told about marketing that are not true, or only partly true. Every claim in the series is checked against the source that runs the system, and where the evidence is thin we say so. We have tried to be fair to this one, because part of it is right.

Where the claim is true, or nearly

You are testing an idea. A profile needs no domain, no hosting and no designer, so it is a quick way to find out whether anyone wants what you sell. If you do not know that yet, spending weeks and money on a website first is the wrong order.

Your customers already find you there. For businesses that sell on looks and personality, such as cake makers, florists, hairdressers and tattoo artists, the profile is the portfolio, and people often book by message. For younger buyers a visible social presence is itself a check: in a YouGov survey of 2,119 adults in Great Britain, carried out on 29 and 30 December 2025, 23% said they look for an active social media presence before buying from an unfamiliar online store, rising to 40% of 18 to 24 year olds.

Your trade is local and walk-in. For a café or a shop, a complete Google Business Profile (hours, photos, reviews, a pin on the map) may do more work than a website does, and our local SEO checklist covers how to fill one in. A profile does not need a website to exist: when Google turned off the free websites it used to build from Business Profiles, the profiles themselves carried on. Google also says a Business Profile can help a business appear in its AI responses as well as in ordinary results.

A link-in-bio page is a fine signpost. It is a sensible way to point people from your profile to the places they can book, buy or read more. The mistake is treating it as the destination.

Where it falls apart

You rent the account, and the landlord can lock the door

Instagram's terms of use, effective from 4 March 2026, say Meta "can refuse to provide or stop providing all or part of the Service to you", including by terminating or disabling your access, for reasons that include breaking its terms or policies. People who say they broke nothing get caught too. Appeals Centre Europe, an independent body that hears EU users' disputes with platforms, says in its transparency report for April 2025 to March 2026 that it received more than 4,600 eligible Facebook and Instagram account suspension disputes, and that Meta gave it the content in fewer than 100 of them. When the BBC reported those figures in May 2026, it added that more than 500 people had contacted the BBC the year before, complaining that their Instagram and Facebook accounts had been banned with no way to appeal or to speak to anyone at Meta, and that Meta frequently overturned bans when the BBC raised individual cases.

Accounts also get taken. Action Fraud received 35,434 reports of hacked social media and email accounts in 2024, up from 22,530 in 2023, according to the warning it issued with Meta on 17 March 2025.

Nor do you decide who sees your posts. Meta says the content people see in their Instagram Feed is "selected, ranked and delivered to you by an artificial intelligence (AI) system". Your followers are an audience Instagram lets you reach, on its terms.

A website can be hacked too, and a hosting company can let you down. The difference is that a domain registered to your business is yours to move. For .uk addresses, Nominet, which runs the registry, sets it as a policy principle that people who register a domain "must be able to move between Registrars". If something goes wrong, you can take the address somewhere else and carry on. Nobody can do that with an Instagram handle.

Search engines see less of you than your followers do

Instagram does let search engines show some posts. Its help centre says it allows search engines to index photos and videos from public posts and reels uploaded from 1 January 2020 onwards, from accounts that are public, professional and held by someone over 18.

But a post is not built to answer a search. Someone typing "wedding florist near Epsom prices" is looking for a page that says what you do, where, and roughly what it costs. A grid of photographs rarely says that in words a search engine can match.

Most AI assistants' search crawlers are told to keep out

This is the part that has changed most, and the part the "just use Instagram" advice predates.

Every website publishes a robots.txt file telling crawlers what they may read. When we checked Instagram's on 26 September 2026, it blocked GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic) and PerplexityBot by name, and ended with a rule blocking every crawler it had not named. That rule catches OAI-SearchBot, which OpenAI says is the crawler used to surface websites in ChatGPT's search features, and Claude-SearchBot, which Anthropic uses to index content for search. Google's and Bing's crawlers are allowed into much of the site.

It is not a complete wall. When someone asks an assistant to look at a page, the fetch is made on their behalf, and the companies say such fetches may not follow robots.txt: OpenAI says "robots.txt rules may not apply" to ChatGPT-User, and Perplexity says its user-triggered fetcher "generally ignores robots.txt rules". Assistants that draw on Google's or Bing's results may also pick up public posts. What you cannot count on is an assistant finding and describing you when someone asks for a recommendation. Your own website is the source you control that these crawlers are allowed to read.

Link-in-bio services vary. Linktree's robots.txt, for example, lets these search crawlers in. But a page of links says almost nothing about what you do, so there is little for an assistant to quote.

Free and hosted things change without asking you

Google used to offer free websites built from your Business Profile. Its own help page says that from 5 March 2024 those sites were "no longer available", visitors were redirected to the Business Profile until 10 June 2024, and after that they got a "Page not found" error. Businesses that had relied on them had to build something else, quickly.

None of this means a platform will vanish. It means anything you do not own can change on someone else's timetable.

What we would do instead

Keep Instagram, if your customers are there. Add the smallest thing that you own.

1. Register a domain in your business's name. Even if the site is one page for now, the address is yours and it can grow.
2. Build one page that answers the buyer's first questions: what you do, who for, where, a price or price band, how to get in touch, and a link to your Instagram. That page is what search engines and assistants can read and quote.
3. Complete your Google Business Profile, and your Bing Places listing, with the same name, description and contact details as the page.
4. Point your link-in-bio at your own site first, then at the booking or shop links.
5. Protect the accounts you do rely on. Turn on two-step verification, as Action Fraud advises, and make sure more than one trusted person can get into the business's accounts.

A single page on a website builder costs a subscription and a domain; what a fuller site costs, and what drives the price, is in how much a website costs. If you would rather have one page planned and built properly around the one thing you want visitors to do, that is our landing page sprint.

If what you want is someone to run your Instagram itself, that is not us: social media management is not a service we offer. We work with trusted partner agencies and can introduce you to the right one, and our guide to choosing a social media agency sets out what to ask any agency before you sign.

A quick way to decide

The more of these that are true, the more a website of your own matters.

• People who do not follow us search for what we sell.
• Customers compare a few options before choosing.
• We sell to other businesses, or what we sell costs enough that people research first.
• We would lose real income if our Instagram account disappeared for a month.
• We want AI assistants to describe us accurately when asked for a recommendation.
• We want people to find our prices and details without having to message us first.

If none of them is true yet, Instagram and a Google Business Profile may be all you need for now. Revisit it when one becomes true.

Where the evidence is thin

We looked for good UK evidence on how many customers refuse to buy from a business with no website, and did not find any we would rely on. The figures we found came from surveys commissioned by companies that sell websites or hosting. The YouGov figures above are about unfamiliar online stores, not all small businesses.

It is also often said that having a website helps a Google Business Profile rank in the map results. Google's own local ranking guidance lists relevance, distance and prominence, and says prominence takes in how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have. It does not say a website of your own is required, so we would not claim it is.

Nor could we find anything published by OpenAI, Anthropic or Perplexity on how often their assistants use Instagram content they reach through other routes. That is why we say you cannot count on it, rather than that it never happens.

Marketing myths, checked: the series

This piece is the first in a series. Each one takes a claim small businesses are commonly told, checks it against what Google, Microsoft, the regulators and the platforms themselves publish, and says plainly whether it is true, partly true, or not settled by the evidence. The next pieces cover what small businesses are told about AI, search, advertising, reviews, agencies and what marketing costs, and each is listed here as it is published.

• Do you still need a website, or is Instagram enough? This piece. Verdict: partly true.