Last year I asked an AI to name the best companies near a homeowner with a rotting deck. A deck company I work with wasn’t on the list, so I asked it why. The answer was that the company looked good, but its name was listed differently in a supplier’s dealer directory, so it hadn’t mentioned them. I called my client and told them to update the name there.
On Tuesday, November 10, 2026, OpenAI announced Businesses in ChatGPT. It’s in beta. Companies can claim a business, add pricing and availability, and see mentions and website clicks.
What claiming gets you
OpenAI’s terms say it can list your business whether or not you claim it, and that it can add to, edit or replace what you submit using other sources, or decline to show it. So claiming doesn’t give you exclusive control, doesn’t guarantee more visibility, and doesn’t let you steer what ChatGPT recommends on its own. What it does give you is a way to submit and correct information about your business, while OpenAI decides what gets shown. After the deck company, I’ll take that.
My view is that it’s worth the effort. I wouldn’t pay an agency extra to manage it, though, until somebody can show me what it’s doing.
What to do
Start at the announcement link above, which gets you to Business Hub, OpenAI’s page for claiming and managing a business. Have someone at your company do it, the owner or whoever represents the business, not your agency.
Mine asked for a DNS record first, then identity verification. (DNS is the setting that points your web address at your website.) OpenAI verifies each business and the method varies, so yours can differ.
While you’re in there, check that your business name, address, phone number and website read the same everywhere an AI might look. After what happened with my client, that’s the first thing I’d check.
Then ask an AI who it would recommend for a customer like yours. If you’re not named, ask why and see what it says. An AI’s explanation of its own answer isn’t proof, so treat it as a lead to check.
Last, open Agent builder in Business Hub and see whether it’s there for your business. A Business Agent is an AI that answers customers for a company. OpenAI says eligible U.S. ecommerce and online service businesses can launch one and sponsor it as the destination for ChatGPT Ads, which are ads inside ChatGPT. On my account, the Agent builder page says it isn’t available yet, that OpenAI is rolling it out gradually to different types of businesses, and that it’ll be available for my business soon.
What I don’t know yet
I don’t know whether claiming changes what ChatGPT says about a business. OpenAI says it doesn’t promise more visibility, and I haven’t built an agent in ChatGPT, so I can’t tell you what one does.
What I do have is numbers on AI traffic, from my article on AEO and GEO. We pulled a year of Google Analytics, October 22, 2025 through October 21, 2026, for 36 businesses we work with. On the 24 lead generation sites in that group, the AI platforms we could identify sent about one visit for every 58 that came from Google organic search. That counts visits, not customers. It also undercounts AI visits, because some AI research ends in a Google search or a phone call, and some AI clicks arrive as direct traffic. None of those get counted as AI visits. None of it says anything about claiming.
Where I think this goes
This part is my view, and OpenAI hasn’t announced it. I expect ChatGPT to start handing people off to a company’s own agent partway through a conversation. If that happens, the agent has to know who your customers are, what matters to them and what your business believes, or it won’t sound like you. Working that out comes first. I put diagnosis before deployment on every build, agents included.
Claim it. And if you get stuck on verification, reply to this email and we’ll help.
Curtis Hays Bullhorns & Bullseyes
This marks a sea change we will all point back to one day. The moment ChatGPT took the reins from Google. Get this on your radar, folks...