OpenAI Opened Verified Business Profiles in ChatGPT on November 10. Business Agents Are US Only for Now. Here Is What I'd Do Before Someone Else Describes My Product.
On Tuesday, November 10, OpenAI launched a beta called Businesses in ChatGPT. Companies can verify a profile, edit what ChatGPT shows about them, and see how often the assistant mentions them and how many people click through. Eligible US firms can also attach a Business Agent that answers questions about their products inside ChatGPT. If you sell anything a person might ask a chatbot about, there is now a place where the facts about your product get stated, and you can either supply them or let the model infer them.
What launched
I am working from two reports, TechCrunch and The Next Web. OpenAI's own announcement page would not load for my fetch tool, so nothing below is quoted from OpenAI directly except where a reporter quoted it.
Per The Next Web, verified companies get a blue check and can update their details, prices and stock. A tool called Business Hub shows aggregated data: how often ChatGPT mentions the business, how many people click through to its website, and common topics in those conversations. OpenAI says it does not share users' chats with businesses. TechCrunch describes the same insights as profile views, mentions and website clicks, and compares the whole thing to Google Business Profile and Google Analytics.
Business Agents are narrower. The Next Web reports they are open to eligible US ecommerce and online-service firms. A user who sees the business in an answer can open its profile and chat with the agent, and those exchanges are labelled and kept apart from ChatGPT's own replies. The reported rules are that agents must say they are AI, keep prices accurate and avoid pressure tactics, and that purchases or sharing personal data need the user's explicit approval. Buyers are sent to the brand's website for now. OpenAI is building agent payments with Visa, with no date given.
What nobody has said yet
The list of missing facts is long, and it is the reason I would not rearrange my week around this.
Neither report states a price for profiles or agents. Neither names the countries where profiles are available. On verification, TechCrunch says businesses go through "a formal process" and that OpenAI did not share specifics. Benji Shomair, OpenAI's VP of Monetization, told reporters there are "multiple verification methods that we use for different types of business in different markets." Eligibility criteria for agents are not published beyond the two categories, and there is no date for the beta to end.
The ranking question is the one I care about most. The Next Web, citing Digiday, reports OpenAI's position that paying does not change how often ChatGPT recommends a business. That is a paraphrase in a secondary report, not a quoted commitment. Nothing I read says whether a verified profile affects how often you are mentioned, and I would not assume it does.
Why OpenAI is building this
It helps to see where this sits in OpenAI's business. TechCrunch notes that OpenAI earlier tried to make ChatGPT a shopping destination with a checkout feature and a commission, and retired that effort in March. The Next Web reports that ChatGPT Ads passed a $1 billion annual run rate in August and has 100,000 advertisers, that OpenAI has been testing Sponsored Agents since September, and that the same business agents can run as ads. OpenAI puts weekly ChatGPT users at 1.2 billion.
Read together, the free-looking profile is the top of a funnel that ends in an ad product. Google Business Profile worked the same way. I do not think that is sinister, and I also would not mistake it for a neutral directory.
What I'd actually do
For a one-person product, my plan this week costs about an hour and most of it is not on OpenAI's platform at all.
- Ask ChatGPT about your own product. Use the three or four questions a buyer would type, including one with a competitor's name in it. Save the answers with the date. This is your baseline, and it tells you what is wrong today.
- Fix the source. Where an answer is wrong, the cause is usually your own site: a pricing page that hides the number behind a toggle, an old plan name still in the docs, or a feature list that lives only in a changelog. Put current prices and plan limits in plain text on one page.
- Claim the profile if it is offered to you. I would do it for the same reason I would claim a Google listing, which is that an unclaimed one can still be wrong. Because the verification steps are not public, I would read exactly what documents it asks for before uploading anything.
- Skip the Business Agent for now unless you are a US store with real volume. An agent that must keep prices accurate is one more surface to update every time you change a plan, and I already forget to update my own FAQ.
- Write down the Business Hub numbers once a month if you get access. Mentions and click-throughs with no baseline are trivia. With three months of history, they tell you whether the fixes in step two did anything.
I would not buy ads against this yet, and I would not pay anyone who says they can optimize your ChatGPT ranking. No one outside OpenAI has seen how the ranking works.
Where this could be wrong
It is possible that early verified profiles get an advantage that later ones do not, the way early Google listings collected reviews first. If that happens, an hour spent claiming one now would look cheap. It is also possible the beta stays small, goes the way of the checkout feature and is gone by spring. OpenAI has already reversed course once this year on how businesses appear in ChatGPT.
My read is that both outcomes point to the same work. Accurate prices and plain product facts on your own domain help with ChatGPT, with every other assistant and with ordinary search, and they survive a product being retired. The profile is worth an hour. Your pricing page is worth more.
Author
Lukas
@lukcombinator