You Can Now Claim Your Business in ChatGPT. Should You?

People already ask ChatGPT which business to use. As of this week, a business can claim its profile there, correct its own details and see how often it comes up. Claiming does not buy you a better position, and the feature that lets you answer customers directly is not in Canada yet.

What OpenAI launched

On 10 November 2026 OpenAI introduced Businesses in ChatGPT, in beta. It has two parts. Business Hub is where a company claims its profile, manages its information and sees how people engage with it. Business Agents let a company answer customer questions inside ChatGPT, and those are limited for now to eligible ecommerce and online service businesses in the United States.

OpenAI puts ChatGPT's audience at 1.2 billion people a week. Its pitch is that a business can now keep its own information current in the place where those people are asking what to buy and who to hire.

For a Canadian business, claiming is the part to look at. OpenAI says eligibility depends on industry, location and its verification and integrity checks, so the way to find out is to try it in Business Hub. The agent feature is not available here yet, and OpenAI has given no timetable for other markets.

What claiming gets you

Once your claim is approved and you have completed identity verification, which OpenAI runs through a provider called Persona, you can update your website, description, category, logo, delivery policy and return policy. Retailers can add product feeds. A blue check appears on the profile to show it has been claimed.

OpenAI says ChatGPT may use the information you provide to answer customer questions. That is the practical value. If ChatGPT is describing your return policy to somebody, you would prefer it used the one you wrote this year.

Shopify merchants can connect their store to speed up verification. OpenAI notes that eligible Shopify products were already in ChatGPT through Shopify Catalog, so the connection is about verification, not about getting listed.

What claiming does not get you

OpenAI is direct about the limits, and they are the part a marketing summary will leave out.

Claiming does not change your visibility. It does not guarantee higher placement or sales. ChatGPT continues to make its own recommendations and comparisons, and OpenAI states that advertising does not influence those independent answers. You do not need an ads account or an enterprise agreement to claim a profile.

So this is not a ranking lever. It is closer to correcting your entry in a directory that a very large number of people consult.

How to read the insights

Insights cover the past 28 days and show three things: mentions, website clicks and discovery topics, which are common themes in the answers that mentioned or cited you.

Two cautions come from OpenAI's own help page. Businesses do not receive individual prompts or conversations, including chats with their own agent. And counts may be incomplete: a blank metric can mean activity has not reached a reporting threshold, and does not necessarily mean zero.

Treat the numbers as direction, then. A blank is not proof that nobody asked about you, and a rising mention count is not proof of sales. It is the same discipline as asking what any figure was built from, which we set out in explaining a number instead of just finding it.

What to do this week

Claim the profile if you are eligible. Nothing in OpenAI's pages mentions a charge for claiming, though they do not say it will stay free either. The work is an hour of verification and data entry.

Before you fill it in, make your website agree with itself. Your delivery and return policies, opening hours and service area should say the same thing on your site, on the profile and on your other listings. An assistant drawing on three versions of a policy will pick one, and it may not be the current one. That groundwork is covered in getting your business cited in AI answers.

Put one person in charge of it. A claimed profile with a stale return policy is worse than an unclaimed one, because it carries a blue check. And keep it separate in your mind from paid placement, which works differently and is covered in ChatGPT ads.

If you sell online, watch for the agent feature reaching Canada, and decide in advance what it would be allowed to say. An agent answering in your name about products and policies needs the same guardrails as any customer self-service tool.

Frequently Asked Questions