ChatGPT will tell businesses how often it mentions them

A business will be able to see how many times ChatGPT named it and how many clicks its website got from those answers. OpenAI introduced Business Hub in beta on Tuesday, a dashboard where companies claim their profile inside the chatbot, correct their details and check those figures for the past 28 days.

What matters to users is what stays out of the dashboard. OpenAI says it does not share users' conversations or chats with business agents. Companies get counts and so-called discovery topics, the common subjects of conversations in which their page is cited. The data appears only once enough conversations meet certain thresholds, and the company does not say what they are.

A profile can be claimed with a phone number, a business email, a web domain or a Shopify store. Seeing the data, publishing changes or building an agent also requires identity verification through Persona, an outside service, after which a blue badge appears. OpenAI's help center says no ads account or Enterprise contract is needed.

Business Agents are the other piece. An eligible business can build an agent that answers customer questions using information the business supplies. For now they are limited to e-commerce and online services in the United States, so Mexico is out. Profiles can be claimed wherever ChatGPT is available, according to the announcement, though what is offered depends on a company's location and type.

All of that is OpenAI's own description. No one outside the company has tested the dashboard, so there is no way to know whether the mention and click counts are accurate. There is no price either, and the announcement does not say whether Business Hub will carry a fee. It does say an agent can be sponsored as a destination for ChatGPT ads, with sponsored spots labeled and kept apart from answers.

Until now, brands measured their presence in chatbots by firing off questions and noting the replies. With this dashboard, the platform itself hands over first-party data, and the catalogs and prices a business uploads feed into what ChatGPT says about it.