Claim your business in ChatGPT: what the new Business Hub does and doesn't do

Since 10 November you can claim your business in ChatGPT. OpenAI opened a Business Hub where a company verifies that it owns its listing, corrects the details ChatGPT shows, adds a product feed and sees how often ChatGPT mentions it. It’s free for now and still in beta. The question for Dutch companies: can we claim ours, and is it worth an hour?

What Businesses in ChatGPT is

OpenAI calls the programme Businesses in ChatGPT. The Business Hub lives at chatgpt.com/business-hub and has three parts:

• A listing with your business details: website, description, category, logo and policies.
• Insights: how often ChatGPT mentions you and how many clicks it sends to your site.
• Business Agents: a chat agent for your company inside ChatGPT that answers questions about your products and policies.

OpenAI says this gives businesses “a new way to provide information to ChatGPT”. You don’t need an Enterprise contract or an ads account, and claiming is free at launch. OpenAI’s vice president of monetisation didn’t rule out charging later.

Can Dutch companies claim their listing?

Partly. According to VentureBeat’s summary of OpenAI’s rules, eligible businesses can apply in markets where ChatGPT is available and OpenAI supports the verification. The limits matter:

Type of business	From the Netherlands
Webshop, SaaS or other online business with a website	Can claim or create a listing
Local shop, restaurant or practice	Not yet: local businesses can only claim an existing US listing
Business Agent (the chat agent)	Not yet: US ecommerce and online service businesses only

Where a B2B service company with an office falls isn’t always clear; Business Hub shows what it offers once you search for your business. OpenAI says more markets will follow, without dates.

How verification works

Claiming takes two checks. First you prove the business is yours, with one of these methods, depending on what Business Hub offers you (OpenAI’s setup guide lists them):

• a code by text or phone call to the business number;
• a business email address;
• a DNS TXT record on your domain;
• your Shopify store.

After OpenAI approves the claim, the person who manages the listing passes an identity check with Persona. Only then can you publish changes, connect a product feed, view insights or build an agent. The blue check mark appears after that identity check, not after the claim.

Use the DNS route if you can: it ties the listing to a domain your company controls, not to one employee’s phone. Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable raised the risk of listings being hijacked. Claiming early is the simplest way to make sure the person who controls yours is you.

What the insights show, and what they don’t

The dashboard shows totals for the past 28 days: mentions, website clicks and recurring topics that lead ChatGPT to your business. For an online business, a mention only counts when ChatGPT references your website, not when it names your brand without a link. Small businesses may see empty charts at first, because OpenAI only shows data above a minimum volume.

A few limits to keep in mind:

• A click is a click on a link in ChatGPT. The tooltip says itself that clicks “don’t confirm website visits or conversions”.
• You don’t see the prompts, the conversations or how you rank against competitors, as Digiday reported.
• It covers ChatGPT only. Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Google’s AI answers are not in it.

Does claiming make ChatGPT recommend you more?

No. OpenAI says ChatGPT keeps making its own recommendations and that a profile doesn’t guarantee better placement or more sales. What a claim changes is the information ChatGPT can draw on: your own description, correct policies and, for webshops, current prices and stock. Useful, but it doesn’t replace a clear website and other sources that mention you.

Read the terms before you accept them. According to Gaurav Tiwari’s reading of the terms, OpenAI can show a listing for your business whether you claim it or not, and businesses that use product feeds agree that OpenAI’s crawlers may access their site, with a text and data mining opt-out that doesn’t apply to OpenAI. We haven’t verified that against the terms ourselves, so check the current version, and ask your adviser if the crawler clause matters to you.

What to do now

1. Search for your business in Business Hub and see whether a listing exists and what it says.
2. Claim it if you can, preferably through your domain, with a shared company account rather than someone’s private ChatGPT login.
3. Correct the basics: description, category, website and policies, in line with your own site.
4. Webshops: decide whether to connect a product feed, after reading the feed terms.
5. Note today’s numbers for mentions and clicks, so you have a baseline.
6. Can’t claim yet? Note it and check again in a few months. Your website still does most of the work.

How we approach this

As tech lead of Trackbase we measure what AI assistants tell customers about a brand, across more than ten engines, with the prompts, the competitors and the sources they cite. Business Hub’s numbers are useful, but cover one assistant and leave out the questions behind them. If you want your product data to reach ChatGPT and other assistants straight from your shop or ERP, that’s the kind of link we build in our custom web applications.