OpenAI wants businesses to stop being mentioned in ChatGPT and start existing inside it. On Tuesday the company launched Businesses in ChatGPT in beta, a suite that gives companies a verified presence on the platform: a claimable business profile, aggregated analytics about how ChatGPT users find them, and a new kind of branded assistant called a Business Agent that can talk directly with customers.
The foundation is a tool called Business Hub. Companies can claim their business in ChatGPT, pass a verification process, and then update key details such as descriptions, locations and pricing. They can also add self-serve product feeds with prices and availability, so that answers about their catalog draw on current data rather than whatever the model remembers. Existing OpenAI enterprise customers and advertisers can claim their profile through their OpenAI representative, while Shopify merchants can connect a store directly from Business Hub or the Shopify admin, building on the Shopify Catalog integration that already feeds product data into ChatGPT.
Once verified, businesses get aggregated insights: how many times they were mentioned in ChatGPT responses, how many users clicked through to their website, and the top "discovery topics" that surface their business. OpenAI says the analytics are privacy-safe by design — companies never see individual conversations, and data only becomes visible once interactions pass certain volume thresholds.
The more aggressive piece is Business Agents: AI agents that officially represent a brand. When a business with an agent appears in a ChatGPT response, users can open its profile and start a conversation — asking what the difference is between two products, whether a plan fits their needs, or anything else about the company's offerings. OpenAI says these chats are clearly labeled and kept separate from the main ChatGPT conversation, so users always know they are talking to a company representative rather than to ChatGPT itself. The rollout starts with eligible e-commerce and online services businesses in the United States.
There is also an advertising hook. Businesses can sponsor their Business Agent and use it as the destination for ChatGPT Ads, with sponsored placements labeled as such. That effectively turns a verified profile into a landing page inside ChatGPT itself, and it is the clearest sign yet of how OpenAI intends to monetize commercial intent on a platform that now reaches roughly 1.2 billion people every week.
The comparison with Google is hard to avoid. Business Hub looks a lot like Google Business Profile, and the discovery topics analytics resemble what merchants get from Google's ecosystem. Benji Shomair, OpenAI's vice president of monetization, told reporters that verification methods will differ by market and business type, without disclosing specifics. In a blog post, OpenAI called the launch "an early step in bringing businesses more deeply into ChatGPT," and said the goal is to help people make informed decisions while giving businesses new ways to participate.
For the AI industry, the move sharpens a battle line that has been forming all year: chatbots are becoming discovery surfaces, and whoever controls the business layer of those surfaces controls the next generation of local and product search. Anthropic's Claude is courting office workers, Perplexity is experimenting with shopping, and Google is defending its merchant empire. OpenAI's answer is to let the merchants in — on ChatGPT's terms.
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