OpenAI opens Business Hub in ChatGPT, with agents businesses can sponsor

OpenAI announced Businesses in ChatGPT on 10 November 2026, a beta in which companies claim a profile in ChatGPT, correct their details, add product feeds and see how often they are mentioned and clicked. The numbers live in a new portal called Business Hub, which has Overview, Agent builder and Products sections. OpenAI pitched the programme at the 1.2 billion people who use ChatGPT each week.

Alongside it came Business Agents: branded chat assistants that eligible US ecommerce and online-service businesses can build, test and publish inside ChatGPT. A business can also pay to sponsor its agent and make it the destination for ChatGPT Ads. OpenAI says sponsored placements are labelled and kept apart from ChatGPT's answers. Claiming a profile is open to eligible businesses wherever ChatGPT is available, but the agents are limited to the United States for now.

“one of the most impactful developments for AI Search: we're finally getting 1st party data from ChatGPT!”

Kevin Indig, Growth Memo newsletter, on the new Business Hub data · ppc.land ↗

The Hub reports mentions, website clicks and "discovery topics", the themes in conversations where a business's site is cited. A tooltip warns that a click does not confirm a visit or a conversion. OpenAI's demo toy shop, Colorful Clatter, shows 15,356 mentions, 1,234 profile views and 5,432 clicks over seven days. Two live dashboards looked very different: BuildUp Bookings had 690 mentions and 24 clicks over 28 days, and Zianvo 28 mentions and one click. By PPC Land's calculation both sit near a 3.5% click-to-mention rate, about a tenth of the demo's. Both read "Data through Nov 9 (UTC)", a day before launch, and showed no profile-views tile.

Getting in takes verification: a text or call to the main business number, or a DNS check, then a review, and then government-ID checks before anyone can edit or publish an agent. Enterprise customers and advertisers can go through their OpenAI representative, and Shopify merchants can connect a store and use Shopify Catalog. Businesses cannot see users' conversations or agent chats, and insights appear only above volume thresholds OpenAI has not quantified. The Hub also promotes ChatGPT Business, OpenAI's separate workplace subscription, whose name is nearly the same.

Reaction was mixed. Kevin Indig of the Growth Memo newsletter saw the first first-party ChatGPT data, a sort of Search Console for ChatGPT. Sandilya Miduthuri argued that topics and click counts without the prompts make it closer to a listing dashboard. Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable said he was nervous about people hijacking businesses, and OpenAI has not said how wrongly claimed profiles would be disputed. Some businesses were waitlisted at launch, and publishers asked whether they can sign up, since the tool is built for sellers.

The launch follows earlier moves. PPC Land reported on 6 November that ChatGPT was building mention and click charts for verified businesses. OpenAI began testing Sponsored Agents on 16 September 2026, and by 21 October ChatGPT ads ran in 89 countries with more than 100,000 advertisers, on Free and Go plans only. Google launched its own Business Agent on 11 January and Meta on 3 June, which makes OpenAI the third big platform with one. Shopify told investors on 3 November that orders from AI searches were up 3.3 times year on year, and that Shopify Catalog searches converted at twice the rate of general AI search.

OpenAI calls this an early step towards bringing businesses into ChatGPT and promises more markets, more categories and tools for complex organisations, with no dates.