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To claim your business in ChatGPT, sign in to ChatGPT, open Business Hub from the sidebar, search for your business, and verify that you control it with one of the methods offered for your business, such as phone, business email, website domain or Shopify. After OpenAI approves the claim, you complete an identity check with Persona. Only then can you publish changes, see Insights and get the blue check. We did this for AY Automate on November 11, 2026, the day after launch, using the website domain method, and the claim and the Persona check were both approved that same day.
OpenAI opened Businesses in ChatGPT in beta on November 10, 2026. It says ChatGPT has 1.2 billion weekly users, and Business Hub is now the official way for a company to manage the information ChatGPT has about it. This guide covers the steps as we saw them, the DNS detail that trips people up, what the Insights screen actually counts, and the parts of the Terms worth reading before you click agree.
What Businesses in ChatGPT is, in one minute
Businesses in ChatGPT is three things, and they have different eligibility:
| Part | What it does | Who can use it |
|---|---|---|
| Business Hub profile | Claim your business, edit its details, add a product feed | Eligible businesses located where ChatGPT is available, where the required verification is supported |
| Insights | Mentions, website clicks and discovery topics over the past 28 days | Anyone with an approved claim and Persona check, once activity meets OpenAI's reporting thresholds |
| Business Agent | A separate, labeled chat that answers questions about your products and policies | Eligible ecommerce and online service businesses in the US with a website, in categories allowed by the Business Agents Policy |
Sources: OpenAI announcement and the OpenAI Help Center setup article, both read on November 13, 2026.
You don't need an Ads account or a ChatGPT Enterprise agreement to claim a business, according to the help article. We did ours from a regular ChatGPT account. OpenAI's pages don't list a fee for claiming a profile. Advertising is separate: the Terms say publishing a Business Agent "does not authorize paid advertising", which needs an advertising relationship with OpenAI.
In short: for most businesses outside the US, or outside ecommerce and online services, Business Hub means a profile plus Insights. No agent. That's still worth having, because it's the only first-party view of how often ChatGPT cites your site.
Who can claim a business in ChatGPT?
You can claim a business if you own it or are authorized to represent it. Beyond that, its product page says eligibility "depends on factors including industry, location, and our verification and integrity checks", and that claiming "is initially available to eligible businesses with a website".
A few specifics from the help article:
- An online business that can't find its listing may see an option to add one.
- Local stores and restaurants can currently claim only an existing US listing.
- Each brand is claimed separately. Claiming the main brand doesn't claim its locations, and there's no central management across a parent company's brands yet.
- Existing OpenAI Enterprise customers and advertisers can work with their OpenAI representative (per the announcement).
The Businesses in ChatGPT policy adds that OpenAI may hold off on some categories "until we have the safeguards needed to support them responsibly". If your category is sensitive, expect a decline or a wait.
How to claim your business in ChatGPT, step by step
This is the flow from the help article, with what we saw doing it.
- Sign in to ChatGPT and open Business Hub from the sidebar. Search for your business by name.
- Pick the matching listing, or add your business if it's an online business and nothing matches. Confirm which ChatGPT account will manage it (read the account note below before you do this).
- Choose a verification method: business phone (SMS or automated call), business email (a code goes to the address tied to the business), website domain (a DNS TXT record) or Shopify (connect the store).
- Wait for claim approval. OpenAI reviews the claim and emails a decision or asks for more information. You can cancel a pending claim.
- Complete identity verification with Persona. Until this is approved you can't publish changes, connect a product feed, view Insights or build an agent.
- Fill in the profile. Website, business description, product or service category, logo, delivery policy, return policy, plus optional extras like a cover photo. OpenAI reviews and publishes each change.
If the listing shows Contact support, it's locked and you have to request access. If someone else already claimed it, the profile's menu has a Dispute ownership option that runs through Persona.
Pick the right ChatGPT account before you claim
The account you claim with becomes the profile's admin. The admin can later add teammates and grant an agency access, each using their own ChatGPT account, and the help article notes that invitations can depend on the claiming account, for example when it sits in a ChatGPT workspace.
What the help article doesn't describe is a way to move ownership to another account. On the OpenAI developer forum, a user who started with a personal account asked for exactly that and reported that the Delete draft option disappeared once they had started verification. That's one user's report, not an OpenAI statement, but the safe move is clear: claim from the work account your company will keep, not a founder's personal login.
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The domain TXT record: the one step that trips people up
We verified with the website domain method because it proves control of the exact domain your profile links to. ChatGPT shows you a TXT record with three parts to copy: type, name (or host) and value. In our case the name was openai-business-profile and the value was openai-business-profile= followed by a long token.
The catch is the name field. Most DNS panels (Namecheap, where our domain lives, and many others) add your domain to whatever you type in the host field. So:
| You type in Host | Record that gets created | Result |
|---|---|---|
openai-business-profile | openai-business-profile.yourdomain.com | Correct |
openai-business-profile.yourdomain.com | openai-business-profile.yourdomain.com.yourdomain.com | Verification fails on panels that append the domain |
@ | yourdomain.com | Wrong place, verification fails |
Before you click Verify domain, check that the record is live from your terminal:
dig +short TXT openai-business-profile.yourdomain.com
If it prints a line starting with "openai-business-profile=, the record is in place. If it prints nothing, wait a few minutes (the help article warns that DNS changes "may take time to appear") or fix the host field. If someone else runs your DNS, send them the three values exactly as ChatGPT shows them.
Tip: keep the TXT record after you're verified. It costs nothing to leave in place, and OpenAI doesn't document what happens if it disappears, so we kept ours.
Persona and the blue check
Claiming and verifying are two separate approvals, and only the second one unlocks the useful parts.
- The claim approval proves you control the phone, email, domain or Shopify store.
- The Persona check proves you're a real person authorized to act for the business. The help article says you may need a government-issued ID, business registration information and proof that you can represent the business.
OpenAI's own pages describe the badge two ways. The product page says a blue check appears "to show it's been claimed". The help article is more specific: "Claiming your business alone doesn't give its profile a verified badge." The check appears after Persona approves you. Plan on the help article's version.
Two details worth knowing before you start Persona:
- Make the names match. The help article asks that the business name, address and any registration or tax number match your official records. A mismatch is an avoidable reason for a failed check.
- Know that Persona can publish your profile. If you use Persona to create a new profile, OpenAI's approval publishes it automatically, with no separate publish step. So fill in the draft properly first.
Our profile sat as a DRAFT until the Persona check came back approved. Only unpublished drafts can be deleted, and the help article says OpenAI Support "is unable to delete, unpublish, or hide a published profile" as part of a setup or ownership request. Treat the Persona submit button as the point of no return.
What Business Hub Insights shows (and what it doesn't)
Insights is the reason most marketing teams will claim a profile. It shows aggregate activity over the past 28 days, in three parts:
| Metric | How OpenAI defines it | What it's good for |
|---|---|---|
| Mentions | For an online business, a mention counts when ChatGPT references the business's website. The brand name alone doesn't count. For a local business, it counts when ChatGPT shows a result for that location. | A first-party count of how often ChatGPT cites your site |
| Website clicks | How often people click through to your website | The traffic side of those citations |
| Discovery topics | Common themes in ChatGPT answers that mentioned or cited your business | Which buying conversations you show up in |
Definitions from the OpenAI Help Center, read November 13, 2026.
The mentions definition matters more than it looks. For an online business, "mentions" means website citations, not brand mentions. If ChatGPT names you but links a directory or a review site instead of your domain, by that definition it shouldn't count. That makes Insights a direct scoreboard for GEO work: getting your own pages cited.
What it doesn't give you:
- You never see prompts or conversations. OpenAI says businesses don't receive individual prompts or chats, including Business Agent chats. Discovery topics are aggregate themes.
- A blank metric doesn't mean zero. It can mean activity is under the reporting threshold, data is still being collected, or reporting is unavailable.
- History stops at 28 days. We didn't find an export option or an API, and the window rolls. If you want a trend line, write the numbers down weekly.
We're not publishing our own Insights figures. The Terms define Insight Data as OpenAI's Confidential Information and limit sharing it, so check that clause before you post screenshots of yours on LinkedIn.
Read these clauses in the Terms before you click agree
By using Businesses in ChatGPT you accept the Businesses in ChatGPT Terms (last updated November 9, 2026). Most of it is standard, but a few clauses deserve a minute of your time, or your lawyer's. This is a plain summary, not legal advice.
| Section | What it says | Why you'd care |
|---|---|---|
| 4.1 Business listings | OpenAI may show a listing about you "regardless of whether you claim" it, and claiming "does not give you exclusive control over its contents" | Not claiming doesn't keep you out of ChatGPT. It just means you aren't the one correcting it |
| 4.1 Calls | "OpenAI's AI assistant may make calls to you on behalf of our users", with an opt-out link | Your front desk may get calls from ChatGPT's assistant |
| 4.2 Public information | The license for basic details you submit for public display (name, address, contact details, category, hours, website) is "perpetual and irrevocable" | Assume anything you put in those fields stays usable |
| 3 Product feed | If you provide a feed, you agree that any text and data mining opt-out you have will have "no effect" with respect to OpenAI, for your and your affiliates' websites and Customer Data | Matters if your site blocks AI crawlers on purpose |
| 6 Insight Data | Insight Data is OpenAI's Confidential Information; you can use it only to measure and report on your own use | Limits on publishing your numbers |
| 8 No guarantees | No guaranteed placement, ranking, visibility, traffic or sales | Claiming is not a ranking boost |
| 10 Claims and remedies | A covenant not to sue and a release for "Covered Claims", which the definitions extend to content in Customer Data or on websites you or your affiliates own or operate, including content published before you signed up, other than claims that OpenAI breached these Terms | Publishers and companies with content-licensing positions should get legal review first |
The help article backs up section 8 in plain words: claiming "doesn't guarantee increased visibility or give you direct control over ChatGPT's independent recommendations", and "advertising doesn't influence ChatGPT's independent answers".
What to fix on your site before you claim
Claiming lets you supply facts, but OpenAI says ChatGPT "may also use other sources when answering questions about your business", and the policy says profiles can include information from other sources. If your site, your LinkedIn page and the directories disagree with what you type into Business Hub, you're one source among several. Fix the sources first:
- Let ChatGPT's search crawler in. OpenAI's crawler documentation says sites that opt out of
OAI-SearchBotwon't be shown in ChatGPT search answers. You can blockGPTBot(training) and still allowOAI-SearchBot(search); the settings are independent. Since a mention only counts when ChatGPT references your website, blocking the search crawler works against the metric you're trying to read. - Say what you do in the first lines of your main pages. One sentence that names the business, the category and who it serves, matching the description you'll write in Business Hub.
- Make your facts consistent everywhere. Same business name, category, location or service area and contact details on your site, schema markup, LinkedIn and the directories that rank for your name. The policy requires profile information to be accurate and kept current, and it's easier when there's one version of it.
- Write the category and description for buyers. ChatGPT may use this information to answer customer questions. Keep it factual. The policy bans "false or misleading claims about prices, availability, qualifications, or likely results".
We cover the page-level side of this, answer-first structure, tables and schema, in how to get cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity. If you'd rather have it done, our GEO and AI search optimization service starts with a free 30-minute audit of where ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and AI Overviews cite you today and where they skip you.
Where Business Hub fits in an AI search plan
Business Hub is worth an afternoon for almost any company with a website. It fixes your facts at the source, and Insights shows how often ChatGPT cites your site, a number no third-party tool can read directly. It isn't a GEO strategy on its own:
What it does well
- Gives you an official channel to correct your description, category, logo and policies
- Counts website citations and clicks from ChatGPT, straight from the source
- Lets eligible US ecommerce and online service businesses add an agent customers can question
What it won't do
- Guarantee that ChatGPT recommends you more often (OpenAI says so in three places)
- Show you the prompts, or anything about Perplexity, Gemini, Claude or Google's AI Overviews
- Keep more than 28 days of history
For coverage beyond ChatGPT, you still need a tracker across engines; we compared the options in the best AI search visibility tools.
FAQ
Is it free to claim your business in ChatGPT?
OpenAI's pages don't list a fee for claiming a business or using Business Hub during the beta, and you don't need an Ads account or ChatGPT Enterprise. Paid options are separate: sponsoring a Business Agent or running ChatGPT Ads needs an advertising relationship with OpenAI.
How long does ChatGPT business verification take?
OpenAI says review time varies and it emails a decision or a request for more information. For us, the domain claim and the Persona identity check were both approved on November 11, 2026, the day we submitted them, but early-beta speed may not last as more businesses apply.
Does claiming my business make ChatGPT recommend it more?
Not by itself. OpenAI's help article says claiming "doesn't guarantee increased visibility", and the Terms rule out any guaranteed placement or ranking. The work most likely to help is the same work that gets your own pages cited: pages that answer clearly and facts that match everywhere.
Can I get a Business Agent outside the US?
Not yet. Business Agents are available to eligible ecommerce and online service businesses in the United States with a website, in categories allowed by OpenAI's Business Agents Policy. OpenAI says it plans to expand to more markets and categories over time, without a date.
What counts as a mention in Business Hub Insights?
For an online business, a mention counts when ChatGPT references your website. Naming your brand without citing your site doesn't count. For a local business, a mention counts when ChatGPT shows a result for that location, even if nobody opens it.
Can an agency manage my ChatGPT business profile?
Yes. The admin who claimed the business can add teammates and grant an agency access to manage the profile or its agent, each person using their own ChatGPT account. Don't forward your claim invitation or share your login. If you want help with the site work around it, book a free 30-minute call.
Can I delete my ChatGPT business profile?
Only an unpublished draft can be deleted, from the three-dot menu on its Overview page. OpenAI Support can't delete, unpublish or hide a published profile as part of a setup or ownership request, so finish your draft before you submit Persona verification.
Which verification method should I use?
Use the website domain method if you can edit your DNS, because it ties the profile to the exact domain it links to. Phone and business email are simpler if you can't touch DNS, and Shopify is the shortest route for Shopify merchants.
Sources: OpenAI, Introducing Businesses in ChatGPT (Nov 10, 2026), OpenAI Help Center, Setting up your business on ChatGPT, OpenAI, Businesses in ChatGPT product page, OpenAI, Businesses in ChatGPT policy (Nov 10, 2026), OpenAI, Businesses in ChatGPT Terms (Nov 9, 2026), OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI crawlers, OpenAI Developer Community thread on ownership transfer. All read November 13, 2026.
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Walid founded AY Automate to help businesses ship AI workflows that actually move revenue. He leads strategy and oversees every client engagement end-to-end.
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