Some screenshots made the rounds this week showing a page inside ChatGPT that reads “Claim your business in ChatGPT.” It’s labeled unreleased/beta and OpenAI hasn’t officially announced it, but the details are pretty telling. Businesses would be able to see how often they’re mentioned in ChatGPT conversations, add their latest products and keep business info up to date, and set up a business agent that answers customer questions with context the business controls. You’ll need to verify you’re authorized to represent the business, and early reports say that could be as simple as connecting a Shopify store.
The SEO crowd is already calling it a Search Console for ChatGPT, and I think that’s fair. For the last couple of years, if you wanted to know whether ChatGPT was recommending your brand, you either paid a third-party tool to estimate it or ran prompts yourself and kept a spreadsheet. This would be the first time the numbers come from OpenAI directly.
Why I think this is bigger than a dashboard
To me, this looks a lot like Google’s playbook. Google Business Profile started as a way to get your hours and address right. Over time it became the connective tissue across Maps, local results, reviews, and eventually ad products like Local Services Ads and Performance Max. Once a business has a claimed, verified profile on your platform, it’s a lot easier to sell that business media.
I think OpenAI is setting up the same thing, and the ads side is already moving fast. ChatGPT ads went live in the US in February, opened to self-serve advertisers in May, and OpenAI said the ads business hit a $1B annualized run rate by the end of August. Since then they’ve added product feeds, started testing Sponsored Agents where clicking an ad opens a conversation with a business’s own agent, built integrations with Shopify and HubSpot, and started handing ChatGPT Business workspaces up to $50 a month in ad credits.
The business agent in this new claim flow looks like the same building block. Claim your profile, set up your agent, and you’re one click away from putting budget behind it.
What I’m watching for next
I’d expect OpenAI to keep building on-ramps that pull businesses into the platform and give them more reasons to stay. A few I’m keeping an eye on:
- Verification through tools businesses already use. Shopify looks like the first one, and I imagine more commerce and CRM platforms follow.
- Product feeds and business data doing double duty. The same info that shapes organic answers can power ads, the way Merchant Center feeds both free listings and Shopping ads on Google.
- Reporting that lives next to ad performance. Organic mentions and paid results in one place is a pretty natural next step.
- More credits and incentives for SMBs. Free credits are a classic way to get smaller businesses spending for the first time.
The early reporting suggests this sits inside a larger Business Hub, so I don’t think the claim page is the last piece.
What I’d do now
Nobody knows yet whether claiming a profile will actually help you show up more often in answers, so I wouldn’t treat it as a ranking lever. I’d treat it as control over your facts. When it opens up, claim it early, before someone else tries to.
In the meantime, the basics still matter. Make sure your site can be crawled, keep your business info consistent across Google, Bing and Apple, and run the questions your customers would ask through ChatGPT to see where you stand today. That way you have a baseline when the official numbers show up.
If you want help figuring out how your business shows up in AI search, or whether ChatGPT ads make sense for you yet, reach out.