OpenAI has spent the year turning ChatGPT into everything except what it started as: a chatbot. On Tuesday it added the next layer — a business directory. The company launched "Businesses in ChatGPT" in beta, giving companies a way to claim a profile inside the chatbot, manage what it says about them, and see how users engage with them, according to The Hindu BusinessLine.
The mechanics will feel familiar to anyone who has ever claimed a Google Business Profile. Through a tool called Business Hub, a company verifies it owns the business, then updates its key details and adds product feeds with live pricing and availability. The hub also reports aggregated insights — how often ChatGPT mentions the business, how many profile views it gets, how many website clicks it drives. OpenAI says it does not share users' conversations with businesses, and insights only appear once interaction volumes cross certain thresholds.
The second half of the launch is the more consequential one. Eligible e-commerce and online-service businesses in the US can build, test, and launch a Business Agent — an AI representative that answers customer questions from the company's own product and policy information, inside ChatGPT itself. Shopify merchants can connect their stores through Business Hub or the Shopify admin, and existing Enterprise customers and advertisers can claim through their OpenAI representative.
And there is a commercial catch, stated plainly. Businesses will be able to sponsor their Business Agent and use it as the destination for ChatGPT ads, with sponsored placements labeled. That slots neatly into OpenAI's fast-expanding ad business — ChatGPT ads reached 89 countries last month — and it turns the agent into a paid storefront, not just a help desk.
The important detail is what claiming does not do. OpenAI says it does not guarantee higher placement in ChatGPT's answers or more sales. But the directory already exists whether a business claims it or not; ChatGPT has been answering questions about companies for years, drawing on whatever it could find. Claiming is less about getting listed than about taking control of a listing that was already there — and the agent is the upsell.
For the 1.2 billion people OpenAI says use ChatGPT each week, the change is subtle at first: the answer to "where should I buy this" may now come from the seller itself, wearing a verified badge. For everyone else, it's the clearest sign yet of where OpenAI's money comes from next — not the subscription, but the storefront. Watch whether the sponsored-agent lane stays clearly labeled when it starts filling up, and whether small businesses without an ad budget find their claimed profiles any more visible than they were yesterday.
— via The Hindu BusinessLine