On November 10, 2026, OpenAI opened Businesses in ChatGPT in beta. The centerpiece is ChatGPT Business Hub, a tool that lets a company claim its business inside ChatGPT, correct the details ChatGPT shows about it, and see aggregate numbers on how often it comes up in conversations.
If you have spent the past two years wondering whether you have any say in what an AI assistant tells people about your business, this is the first place OpenAI has given you one. It is also narrower than the headlines suggest, and a few parts of it are one-way doors. Here is what it does, who can use it, and what it is reasonable to expect.
What ChatGPT Business Hub actually does
Three things, according to OpenAI’s own help documentation:
- Claim. If you own the business or are authorized to represent it, you can claim its listing and become the account that manages it.
- Manage information. Once approved, you can update your website, business description, product or service category, logo, delivery policy, return policy, and a cover photo.
- See insights. Aggregate activity for the past 28 days: mentions, website clicks, and discovery topics.
The reason this matters is volume. OpenAI puts ChatGPT at 1.2 billion people a week, and until this week there was no direct way to correct what it said about you.
How claiming works, step by step
- Sign in to ChatGPT on the web and open Business Hub from the sidebar. Search for your business by name.
- Select the listing that matches, and confirm which ChatGPT account will manage it.
- Verify your connection to the business. OpenAI offers business phone (text message or automated call), business email, a DNS TXT record on your website domain, or a Shopify store connection.
- Wait for approval. OpenAI reviews the claim and emails a decision or a request for more information.
- Complete identity verification with Persona. You may need a government-issued ID, business registration information, and proof that you are authorized to represent the business.
That last step is not optional if you want the useful parts. Per OpenAI, Persona verification is required before you can publish changes to your business information, connect a product feed, view insights, or create an agent. Claiming on its own does not earn the blue verified badge either — that appears after Persona approval.
Two details worth knowing before you start. If you create a new profile through Persona, OpenAI’s approval publishes it automatically, with no separate publish step, so only begin when you are ready for it to be live. And only unpublished draft profiles can be deleted — OpenAI’s help page states that support cannot delete, unpublish, or hide a published profile as part of a setup or ownership request.
If someone else has already claimed your business, there is a Dispute ownership path that runs through the same Persona verification. And if you run a local storefront that has no listing yet, note the limit OpenAI spells out: local stores and restaurants can currently claim only an existing U.S. listing. The option to add one from scratch is for eligible online businesses.
What the insights tell you, and what they don’t
The Insights tab shows a rolling 28-day window with three metrics, and each one has a definition that is easy to misread.
- Mentions. For an online business, a mention counts when ChatGPT references your website. OpenAI is explicit that the brand name alone does not count. For a local business, it counts when ChatGPT shows a result for that location, even if nobody opens the listing or visits the site.
- Website clicks. How often people click through to your site.
- Discovery topics. Common themes across answers that mentioned or cited you. OpenAI says these do not reveal individual prompts and do not directly measure customer intent.
You do not get conversations. OpenAI says businesses receive no individual prompts and no consumer conversations, including chats with their own agent. Insights appear only once activity clears a reporting threshold, which means a blank metric can mean “not enough data yet” rather than zero.
Treat the numbers as a direction, not a scoreboard. A suppressed 28-day aggregate is good for noticing that you are invisible in a category you should own, and useless for week-over-week optimization.
Business Agents are a much narrower product
The flashier half of the announcement is Business Agents: a chat experience, run on information you supply, that answers customer questions about your products and policies. The conversation is labeled, kept separate from the customer’s original ChatGPT thread, and distinct from ChatGPT’s own answers. Businesses can also sponsor an agent and use it as the destination for ChatGPT Ads.
The eligibility is tight. OpenAI says agents are available to eligible ecommerce and online service businesses in the United States that have a website, and the business also has to meet the industry requirements in OpenAI’s Business Agents Policy. If you are a law firm, a clinic, a restaurant, or a trades business in northern New Mexico, you very likely cannot build one today. OpenAI says it plans to expand to more markets and business categories over time, which is a roadmap statement, not a date.
Product feeds put your data plumbing back on the critical path
If you sell products, you can connect a feed so ChatGPT has current prices and availability. OpenAI accepts a Shopify feed, a CSV that follows its published product feed specification, or a hosted feed URL. Shopify merchants can connect from Business Hub or from the Shopify admin to streamline verification, and OpenAI notes that eligible Shopify products are already integrated through Shopify Catalog. One caveat stated plainly in the documentation: connecting a feed does not publish an agent and does not guarantee that ChatGPT recommends your products.
Which turns a long-standing back-office question into a visibility question. A feed is only as good as the system behind it. For W Department, a Santa Fe boutique of curated designer clothing and art, the store’s WooCommerce catalog syncs inventory from their LightSpeed Retail point-of-sale system, so what the website says is in stock reflects what is actually on the floor. A shop in that shape can publish an accurate feed on day one. A shop where prices get hand-edited twice a year will publish stale data to a much larger audience than before.
Should you claim your business in ChatGPT Business Hub?
For most eligible businesses, yes — with one condition. An unclaimed listing is still a listing, and claiming is the only way to correct it or to see whether ChatGPT is sending you anyone. OpenAI’s help page states that you do not need an Ads account or a ChatGPT Enterprise agreement to claim an eligible business, and it does not publish a fee for claiming. The real cost is the verification work: a DNS record or an email code, then a Persona identity check that wants your ID and your business registration. The condition is the one-way door — if Persona approval publishes a brand-new profile for you, OpenAI’s support cannot take it back down. So decide what you want the profile to say before you create one, not after.
The part that hasn’t changed
Business Hub gives you a channel, not control. OpenAI reviews and publishes the changes you submit, says updates can take time to appear in a listing or an answer, and says plainly that ChatGPT may also use other sources when answering questions about your business. Those other sources are mostly your website.
So the work that made you findable before this launch is the same work that makes a claimed profile worth having: service pages that say what you do in plain language, real prices or honest ranges, an about page that is current, and content structured so a machine can tell a product from a policy from a testimonial. Claim the profile. Then go fix the pages it points at.
If you are not sure your site is in shape to feed any of this accurately, that is a reasonable thing to get a second opinion on. Patrick Iverson is a brand strategist and custom WordPress developer in Santa Fe who has run an independent practice in New Mexico since 2001, and has built on WordPress since 2003. If you want to talk through what your business looks like to an AI assistant right now, get in touch.
