ChatGPT now lets businesses claim their profile. Here is what that means for UK firms

On 10 November OpenAI opened a beta called Businesses in ChatGPT. It gives a business three things: a profile it can claim and verify, a dashboard showing how often ChatGPT mentions it, and, for some US online businesses only, an AI agent that answers customer questions inside ChatGPT.

For a UK business, the useful parts today are the first two. Claiming is open to eligible businesses in any country where ChatGPT is available, as long as you have a website. The agent is not available here yet.

The most important line in the whole announcement is OpenAI's own: claiming "does not guarantee higher placement or sales." This is a way to make sure ChatGPT has your correct details and to see how you are showing up. It is not a way to get yourself recommended more often.

Everything sits under one tool called Business Hub, and it has three parts.

A claimed profile. You verify that you own or represent the business, then update your key details. Verified profiles show a blue check. Retailers can also add product feeds with pricing and availability, so ChatGPT is not working from a price list it found two years ago.

Insights. A dashboard showing how often ChatGPT mentions you, how many people view your profile and click through to your website, and what OpenAI calls discovery topics: the themes of the conversations where your website gets cited. It is all aggregated. OpenAI says businesses do not see anyone's conversations, and figures only appear once there are enough interactions to clear a minimum threshold.

Business Agents. A chat agent that answers customer questions using the product and policy information you give it, within rules you set. Agent conversations are labelled and kept separate from ChatGPT's own answer. At launch this is limited to eligible ecommerce and online service businesses in the US.

If you sell through Shopify you can connect your store to speed up verification, but you do not need Shopify to claim a profile.

Partly.

OpenAI says any eligible business located where ChatGPT is offered can claim a profile, and ChatGPT is offered in the UK. Eligibility also depends on your industry, your location and passing verification and integrity checks, and OpenAI has not published the detail of those rules. At launch, claiming is also limited to businesses that have a website. The only reliable way to find out whether yours qualifies is to start a claim.

Business Agents are a different matter. They are US only for now. OpenAI says it plans to add more regions and business types over time, but there is no date.

So if you run an accountancy practice, a trade business or a professional services firm in Bristol, you can probably claim your profile now. You cannot put an agent in front of your customers yet.

Not directly, and OpenAI is unusually clear about it. Claiming is not a ranking boost, and ChatGPT keeps making its own recommendations and comparisons. Coverage of the launch also reports OpenAI saying that paying to sponsor an agent does not change how often ChatGPT recommends a business.

That fits what we already know about how these assistants decide what to say. When ChatGPT describes your business, most of what it is reading was written by somebody else: reviews, directories, articles, forum threads. I wrote about the research behind that last month. A verified profile is one more source, and a trustworthy one, but it sits alongside everything else rather than replacing it.

Where it does help is accuracy. If ChatGPT has your old address, a service you stopped offering, or the wrong opening hours, a verified profile gives it the correct version straight from you. That alone is worth the ten minutes it takes.

There is a paid side, so it is worth being clear about which part is which.

OpenAI lets businesses sponsor their Business Agent and use it as the destination for ChatGPT Ads. This builds on the Sponsored Agents test it started in September. Sponsored placements are labelled and kept apart from ChatGPT's answers.

Claiming a profile and the insights dashboard are the organic side. OpenAI's own pages do not mention a price for them, and launch coverage reports them as free during the beta.

For UK businesses the paid route is mostly academic for now, because the agents it points people towards are only available in the US.

For me this is the bigger change.

Until now, nobody outside OpenAI could tell you how often ChatGPT mentioned your business. Tools, ours included, estimate it by asking a fixed set of real buyer questions on a schedule and counting how often you appear. That is the method we described here. It is a sample, not a census.

Business Hub gives you a first-party number: mentions, profile views, clicks to your site, and the topics you are turning up for. The discovery topics are the useful bit. If ChatGPT cites your website mostly in conversations about something you no longer sell, or never in conversations about your main service, that is a gap you can close on your own site.

Two cautions. The figures only appear once there are enough interactions, so a small local business may see very little at first. And it covers ChatGPT only. Google's AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Copilot each build their own picture of you, so this does not replace checking those too.

1. 01Try to claim your business. Start from OpenAI's Businesses in ChatGPT page. If you are not eligible yet, you will find out quickly.
2. 02Ask ChatGPT what you do before you change anything. Ask it to describe your business, your services and your prices, and write down what it gets wrong. That is your before picture.
3. 03Make your details match everywhere. Business name, address, phone number, services and opening hours should be identical on your website, your Google Business Profile and anywhere else you are listed. A verified ChatGPT profile that disagrees with your Google listing creates exactly the confusion you are trying to remove.
4. 04Check you are not blocking OpenAI from your website. A profile will not do much if ChatGPT cannot read your site. Here is how to check your robots.txt.
5. 05Once insights appear, read the discovery topics. Put them next to the services you actually want to win work for, and look at the difference.

• /Which UK business types pass the eligibility checks, and how long verification takes.
• /When Business Agents will reach the UK, and on what terms.
• /Whether a claimed profile changes how ChatGPT describes a business in practice. OpenAI has not said it does, and nobody has had it long enough to measure.

The third question is the one that matters, and it will take a few months of data to answer honestly.

In the meantime, if you want to know what ChatGPT and the other AI assistants are saying about your business right now, and where they are getting it from, our free visibility check will show you.