OpenAI opens ChatGPT business profiles with mention counts

Search Engine Roundtable says you claim by a text or phone call to your main business number or through DNS verification. VentureBeat also lists an email address or a Shopify account, and says the person managing the listing must pass a separate identity check through Persona before publishing profile changes.

Search Engine Roundtable lists the insights as mentions, profile views, website clicks and discovery topics, which it describes as "common themes across conversations where their website is cited." Business Hub defines clicks as the "Number of recorded clicks on links to your website in ChatGPT" and adds that "Clicks don't confirm website visits or conversions." VentureBeat says the hub shows aggregate activity over the past 28 days, and quotes OpenAI: "We don't share users' conversations or Business Agent chats with businesses."

A second part, Business Agents, lets people start a conversation with a business inside ChatGPT. It starts with eligible ecommerce and online service businesses in the US. VentureBeat, citing Digiday, says claiming a profile and publishing a Business Agent are free at launch, and that Benji Shomair, OpenAI's vice president of monetisation, left open charging later. OpenAI says ChatGPT will keep making independent recommendations and that claiming a profile does not promise better placement.

If you sell online, possibly. VentureBeat says businesses can apply "in markets where ChatGPT operates and OpenAI supports the required verification." A local store or restaurant, though, can claim only an existing US listing for now, and Business Agents are US only too. Neither report names the UK, so if you sell online, the quickest way to find out is to try to claim your business.

Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable's editor, claimed his own business and saw no data at first, though others reported figures appearing. He also raised the risk of businesses being hijacked on the platform, which is a reason to claim yours before someone else tries.

If VentureBeat's description of the rule is right, an online business's mention count follows its website being referenced, not its name appearing in the answer. For a local business, it says, showing the location in a result is enough. Our data shows one side of that gap. In the UK AI Shortlist Study we put 1,000 UK buying questions to ChatGPT in three rounds on 6 and 7 September 2026 and checked each answer for the business whose own website ranked first on Google.

Of 1,632 answers we could score, ChatGPT named that business in 449. In another 73, the business appeared only among the answer's sources, in its source links or labels, and its name was missing from the text a reader sees. Those 73 answers involved 43 businesses in 20 of the study's 25 categories. Under the rule VentureBeat describes, answers like these could count as mentions even though the reader was never told the business's name.

The opposite case matters too. An answer that names your business without linking your website may not count at all. Our study did not record whether the answers that named the business also linked to it, so we cannot say how often that happens.

If you can, claim your business while it is free, and check the details it shows are right. Read the mention and click figures as a 28-day total that tracks your website being referenced, and set the clicks against visits tagged utm_source=chatgpt.com in your analytics, remembering that ChatGPT's tag went missing for a week in October.

Business Hub shows themes, not the questions behind them, so keep your own record of the questions buyers ask and read the full answers, including who ChatGPT names when it leaves you out. That is also where you see whether it names you in the text or only links your site. We covered the reported tool before launch and how much ChatGPT's answers move from one round to the next.

Our free ChatGPT visibility checker puts 3 buyer questions about your category to ChatGPT in a logged-out session and shows whether each answer names you and which pages it cites, with no login. Our ChatGPT visibility tracker page explains how Discoverable records ChatGPT's answers over time.

The figures come from the UK AI Shortlist Study. Its 1,000 buying questions in 25 categories were fixed before collection and put to ChatGPT in three rounds on 6 and 7 September 2026, with the country set to the UK, and Google was searched for each question in each round. We kept every answer where a business's own website was Google's first organic result for that question and round and ChatGPT gave a usable answer: 1,632 answers. A business counted as named when a verified name or alias appeared in the answer text, with the study's published correction for words the text extraction had joined together. It counted as cited only when it appeared in the answer's source links or labels but not in the text. Unclear matches and missing answers were left out.

The counts are the ChatGPT rank-1 row of the study's headline-data.csv (1,183 not named, 73 of them cited only) and the rows in rank-1-to-3-rows.csv, both free to download from the study page. The details of Business Hub come from Search Engine Roundtable and VentureBeat; we have not used it ourselves, and OpenAI calls it a beta.