ChatGPT lets businesses claim a profile, with a customer-facing agent in beta

OpenAI has put Businesses in ChatGPT into beta. Companies can claim their business inside ChatGPT, manage the information shown about them and see how people engage with them, and eligible ones can build a Business Agent for customer questions.

What OpenAI has confirmed so far

The announcement came as a video and a post from the company’s X account on November 10. In the post, OpenAI described the feature as letting businesses “Claim your business, manage your information, and get insights on how people engage with you.” It added that eligible businesses can also build a Business Agent to answer customers’ questions. The post text available to us is cut off after that point.

That is the extent of what we could verify from OpenAI itself. The video page carried no description we could read, and OpenAI’s own pages did not load for us. We therefore have no official word on pricing, countries, the eligibility criteria, or how the agent is configured.

A feature spotted days before launch

The launch follows leaks. According to Digiday, Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of the research firm Marketplace Pulse, posted a screenshot on LinkedIn on November 6 showing a banner reading “Claim your business in ChatGPT”. Digiday reports he first saw traces of the feature in August and that two sources with knowledge of the product confirmed the banner wording.

Digiday’s account of the pre-launch version is more detailed than OpenAI’s post. Claiming a business reportedly requires proof of authority to represent it, and connecting a Shopify store is one route, according to Kaziukenas. A claimed business can track mentions, keep product and company details current, and unlock an agent that answers customer questions using contact details the business supplies. Whether the beta that OpenAI announced matches this version has not been confirmed by the company, which declined to comment to Digiday.

Open questions for brands and shoppers

The most concrete unknown is what the insights actually contain. Digiday describes a dashboard that logs daily impressions and clicks on a chart, and says it does not show the prompts people typed, user data, or rankings against competitors. If the beta follows that design, businesses would learn how often they appear and how many visits result, but not why. That is narrower than the data that generative engine optimization vendors such as Profound and Adthena try to approximate by running prompts at scale; Digiday notes none of them has OpenAI’s own counts.

Second, the commercial context matters. Digiday points out that ChatGPT ads began testing in the US in February, that OpenAI claimed a $1 billion annualized run rate in September, and that in late October it said more than 100,000 advertisers had run campaigns in 89 countries. The outlet argues a business dashboard could support ad sales, in the way Google’s Business Profile and Search Console sit beside Google’s ads. That is Digiday’s reading, not an OpenAI statement, and the announcement says nothing about ads.

Third, a customer-facing agent raises questions the announcement does not answer: how a business reviews or limits what the agent says, what happens when it answers wrongly, and whether customers are told they are talking to an automated agent. Nothing we could read covers these points.

The move also fits a pattern of OpenAI pulling company software and data into ChatGPT, as with Oracle’s business apps and ChatGPT Enterprise on AWS bills. Those deals target employees inside companies. This beta targets the other direction: how a company is presented to the public inside the assistant.

Who can use it now

The word “beta” and the phrase “eligible businesses” suggest access is limited, but OpenAI’s post as available to us does not say who qualifies, whether a paid ChatGPT plan is required, or which regions are included. Businesses that want in should check OpenAI’s help pages and their own ChatGPT accounts for the claim prompt. We will update this report when OpenAI publishes the full details.