OpenAI opened a free Business Hub in ChatGPT this week. Claim your profile now, then put the real effort into the product data behind it.
Every brand that sells online should claim its ChatGPT business profile this quarter. It is free and self-service, and for the first time it gives you OpenAI’s own data on how ChatGPT talks about you. The claim is the easy part, though. What decides whether this helps you is your product feed and the instructions you write for the agent, because those two things are all OpenAI uses to build your brand’s voice in ChatGPT.
What OpenAI launched
OpenAI calls it Businesses in ChatGPT, a beta aimed at the 1.2 billion people OpenAI says use ChatGPT each week. Through Business Hub, a verified business supplies its own company and product information to ChatGPT. It has three parts:
- A business profile. Any eligible business in a market where ChatGPT is available can claim one. Once verified, you get a blue checkmark and can keep your details, photos, and product feeds with pricing and availability current. Shopify merchants’ eligible products already flow in through Shopify Catalog.
- A business agent. Eligible US ecommerce and online services brands can build, test, and launch a chat that speaks for the brand when a shopper wants to explore a product. OpenAI labels it clearly and keeps it separate from ChatGPT’s own answers. When the shopper is ready to buy, the agent sends them to your site.
- Insights. Aggregated counts of mentions, profile views, and website clicks, plus discovery topics: the common themes across conversations where your website is cited.
Brands can also sponsor their agent and use it as the destination for ChatGPT Ads, with sponsored placements labeled. OpenAI started testing that format in September. Benji Shomair, OpenAI’s vice president of monetization, told Digiday that the free and paid versions run on the same underlying agent.
Your product feed is now your brand voice
You can’t bring your own agent. OpenAI runs it and builds it from the instructions and product feed you provide. Whatever your feed says, the agent will say, to a customer, in a conversation you’ll never get to read.
That changes who should own the feed. At most brands, the feed belongs to whoever runs Shopping ads, and it’s tuned for one job: getting approved in Merchant Center. Titles get stuffed with keywords, descriptions get cut short, and attributes get whatever passes validation. That worked when the feed filled a grid of thumbnails. Now the feed is the script for a salesperson.
So the feed becomes a brand asset, and the agent instructions become a brand and compliance document. In regulated categories like supplements and functional beverages, the stakes go up: if the agent makes up a health claim, it makes it in your name. Most brands aren’t organized to treat either one that way yet.
Your organic setup is your ad
The sponsored agent runs on the same agent as the free one, so your organic setup is also your ad creative. A thin feed or loose instructions will underperform on their own, and paid spend will then put that same weak agent in front of more people.
The brands that get their organic agent right first are the ones that will get real value from paying for placement.
What Insights tells you, and what it doesn’t
Insights is the first look at how ChatGPT represents a brand that comes from OpenAI itself. Until now, AI visibility tools like Semrush, Peec.AI, and Otterly.AI estimated it from sampled prompts. Now you can check those estimates against OpenAI’s own counts.
OpenAI keeps the data thin on purpose. It doesn’t share users’ conversations or agent chats with businesses, so you see themes, not transcripts or prompts. Insights only appear once there’s enough activity to clear OpenAI’s thresholds, so smaller brands may see little at first. Share of voice isn’t in the beta, and clicks are link clicks, not completed visits or purchases.
Read on its own, Insights can mislead you. It’s useful once you compare it with your own analytics, your own history, and the third-party tools you already pay for.
What we recommend
Claim your profile now, under your own company account. This looks a lot like the early days of Google Business Profile. The businesses that set up first shaped how they showed up, and the ones that let someone else own the login spent a long time getting it back.
Claiming takes minutes. The real work is getting the feed, the agent, and the measurement right, and that work spans teams that rarely sit together: ecommerce, brand, media, and legal. That’s where we spend our time with clients.
A few honest caveats. Business Hub is free for now, and Shomair didn’t rule out a paid model later. Profiles are open wherever ChatGPT is available, but the business agent is US only and limited to eligible ecommerce and online services categories. OpenAI says it plans to expand to more markets and categories and to build tools for organizations with more complex needs. Shomair also says joining shouldn’t change how often ChatGPT recommends you, while noting that profile data can help ChatGPT match you to more relevant conversations. We treat that as a ranking signal and plan for it. Finally, ChatGPT is one assistant among several, so this adds to your broader answer engine work rather than replacing it.
Sources
- OpenAI’s new business agents give brands a free way into the conversation it’s also selling as an ad, Digiday
- OpenAI gives brands some data about how they appear in ChatGPT, Adweek, November 10, 2026
- ChatGPT is about to show brands their mention count, Digiday, November 9, 2026
- Introducing Businesses in ChatGPT, OpenAI, November 10, 2026