For two years the honest answer to an owner asking how to add a business to ChatGPT was that you couldn't. The assistant read the web, formed its own picture of you, and there was no desk to walk up to if the picture was wrong. On November 10 that changed. OpenAI opened a beta that lets a business claim a ChatGPT business profile, correct its own details, and see numbers on how it shows up. It's the first front door, and it's worth understanding what's behind it before you spend an afternoon there.
What actually launched
There are three pieces, and they're at different stages.
A profile you can claim. Through a new Business Hub, a company claims its organization, gets verified, and can then update key details and add product feeds with pricing and availability. OpenAI says any eligible business located where ChatGPT is available can claim one. Stores on one of the large online-store platforms can connect directly, which shortens verification.
Numbers on how you show up. Once you're in, the hub reports how often your business is mentioned in ChatGPT, how many clicks went through to your website, and what OpenAI calls discovery topics: the common themes of conversations where your website was cited. Nobody outside OpenAI has had that view before.
An agent that answers for you. A business can build a Business Agent that people reach from its profile, to ask follow-up questions about what it sells. That part is limited for now to eligible online stores and online service businesses in the United States, and it can be used as the destination for the ads we wrote about in ChatGPT ads for small business. For a local service company, it's one to watch, not one to build this month.
What to claim first
Claim the profile. It costs an afternoon and it closes the most embarrassing gap, which is the assistant repeating a fact about you that stopped being true: an old address, a service you dropped, hours from before the move.
Before you fill anything in, open your website and your Google Business Profile side by side and settle on one version of the basics: the exact business name, address and phone, the list of services in the words customers use, and the area you cover. Then enter that version, and only that version. A third copy of your details that disagrees with the other two doesn't correct the record. It adds a vote to the confusion. We made the same point about Google's AI answers in what AI Overviews mean for a local business, and it applies here for the same reason: machines trust what several sources agree on.
If you sell products with prices, the feed is the piece worth real effort, because price and availability are exactly the details an assistant gets wrong from a stale page. If you sell a service by quote, there's less to enter, and that's fine.
What the numbers will and won't tell you
The insights are the part we're most interested in, and the part to read most carefully. Three cautions.
First, they're aggregated, and they only appear when there are enough conversations to cross a privacy threshold. OpenAI doesn't share anyone's conversations with a business. A plumber in a mid-sized city may open the dashboard and find very little for a while. Empty doesn't mean invisible. It may only mean small.
Second, a mention count has no denominator. Knowing you were mentioned forty times doesn't tell you how many times someone asked for what you do in your town and heard about someone else. That missing half is still something you check the manual way, by asking the assistant the questions a customer would and reading what comes back. We walked through that in what AI assistants say about your Fort Worth business.
Third, the discovery topics describe conversations where your website was cited. That's a quiet admission of how the whole thing works.
The profile corrects the facts about you. Your website is still what tells the assistant what you do and who you're for.
What a profile can't fix
A profile holds facts: name, location, details, products. It doesn't hold the argument for choosing you. When someone asks an assistant who handles commercial kitchen repair on the west side, or which remodeler takes on older homes, the answer is assembled from pages that say those things plainly. If your site says "a full range of solutions" and keeps the specifics in a PDF, the profile will have your phone number right and the assistant still won't know when to bring you up.
The same goes for access. A claimed profile doesn't help much if your site turns AI crawlers away at the door, which a surprising number of small-business sites do without the owner knowing, usually through a security setting someone switched on years ago. The profile is the listing. The website is the evidence.
We should be straight about what we don't know yet. The beta is days old. We haven't seen enough of the insights to say how useful they are for a small local business, how long verification takes outside the store platforms, or how much weight a claimed profile carries against what the assistant already believes. We'd be lying if we said otherwise, and anyone selling a "ChatGPT profile optimization" package this week is guessing.
Where to start this week
Do it in this order. Settle your basics so your website and your Google listing agree. Claim the ChatGPT business profile and enter the same details. Then spend the saved worry on the thing the profile can't do: making sure your site says what you do, for whom and where, in text a machine can read, and that the assistants are allowed in to read it.
That last part takes twenty seconds to check. Run the free scan to see which AI assistants can read your website, which are being turned away, and whether a machine can tell what your business is.
