When someone asks ChatGPT for "a good plumber near me" or "software for running a consignment shop," it answers with businesses. As of this month, those businesses can claim a profile in ChatGPT, correct what it says about them, see how often they come up, and set up an AI agent that answers questions on their behalf.
Most owners don't know this exists yet. We claimed our own profile the week it opened and helped the clients we work with claim theirs, so this is what we learned doing it, not a rewrite of the announcement.
Did you know you could do this?
OpenAI opened a Business Hub inside ChatGPT. If ChatGPT already knows about your business (from your website, listings and reviews), there's probably a profile waiting for you. Claiming it makes you the one who edits it.
That matters for the same reason your Google Business Profile matters. People are asking AI tools who to call, and the answer is built from whatever the AI could find about you. If that's out of date, thin or wrong, the AI repeats it.
What you get once it's claimed
The profile. Your name, category, description, phone, email, website and address. A few things surprised us:
- You get one category. Pick the one closest to how customers would describe you, not the one that sounds most impressive.
- The description is short, around 300 characters. Lead with what you do and who it's for.
- You can't delete a profile once it's published, so get it right before you publish.
- An address is required, and there's no "service area" option like Google has. If you work from home and keep your address hidden on Google, you'll run into this.
Insights. A simple dashboard of how many times ChatGPT mentioned you, profile views, clicks to your website, and the topics people were asking about when you came up, over 7 or 28 days. The topics are the useful part. For one of the businesses we set up, most mentions came from one part of what they do and almost none from another part they care about, which told us exactly where their website needed more content.
The agent. This is the bigger deal, and it gets its own section.
The business agent: what it is and why you want one
The agent is a version of ChatGPT that speaks for your business. When someone wants to know more about you, they can talk to it directly, and it answers from what you've told it.
You set:
- a tagline and up to three suggested questions customers see first
- instructions of up to 8,000 characters: what to say, what never to say, and where to send people
- business information it can draw on, like products, prices, hours and policies
- optionally, a product feed if you sell products online
There's a "Test in ChatGPT" button so you can try it before customers do.
Why you want one: without it, ChatGPT describes your business from whatever it pieced together. With it, you decide. You can tell it your current prices, which product to lead with, what's available today versus what's coming, and which questions should go to a person. You can also tell it what it must never say, which for some businesses matters more than anything else.
What the agent can't do (and what to watch for)
It writes its own first draft, and the draft can be wrong. When we opened the builder, it had already filled every field from our website. It read well. It also led with the wrong product, described a feature as faster than it really is, and listed things as "planned" that we don't want to promise. If we'd clicked Create, ChatGPT would have said all of that to prospects. Read every line of the draft as if a customer will quote it back to you, because one will.
It only knows what you give it. If a fact isn't in the instructions or business info, it may fill the gap from your website, or it may guess. Tell it plainly: "If something isn't covered here, say you don't know and give them our email."
It isn't a sales or booking system. We didn't find a way for the agent to take bookings, collect leads into your CRM or take payments. Point it to your contact page, booking link or phone number instead.
It's only as current as you keep it. Change your prices or launch something new, and the agent won't know until you update it. Put it on the same list as your website and Google profile.
How to claim yours
- Go to ChatGPT's Business Hub while signed in to ChatGPT, and search for your business.
- Prove you own it. You can verify by phone, by email at your domain, by adding a DNS record to your domain, or through Shopify.
- Verify yourself. ChatGPT asks for a government photo ID through an identity check. If an agency is claiming on your behalf, the person at the agency verifies with their own ID, so have your written OK on file first.
- Verify the business itself. Expect to give business details such as your legal name and EIN.
- Edit the profile: category, description, contact details. Changing the phone number or email sends a code to the new one. In our testing, the code didn't arrive on a VoIP or internet phone number, so use a number that can receive normal texts or calls.
- Build the agent, test it, then create it.
If you're claiming for a business you don't own outright, have the owner's EIN and written OK ready before you start. That's what slowed us down.
This is the new version of an old job
None of this replaces your Google Business Profile. ChatGPT builds its picture of you from your website, your listings and your reviews, so those still have to be right. The ChatGPT profile and agent sit on top. They're the part you can control directly.
That's the work we do: keeping your business accurate and visible wherever people look for it, from Google Business Profile and your website to newer places like this. We've set up ChatGPT profiles for ourselves and for the clients we've helped with this, and built our own agent. We can do yours.
Not sure where you stand? Get a free local visibility snapshot. And if you're still working out which AI tools are worth your time, start with our guide to AI tools for small businesses.