First Bing. Then Google. Now OpenAI.

The companies behind AI assistants are starting to pry open the black box of their models, slowly but steadily.

Yesterday, OpenAI launched Businesses in ChatGPT in beta.

The long and short of it: Your company can claim and verify its profile via Business Hub, add product feeds with pricing and availability, and see aggregated mention, view, and website click data.

If you’re an eligible US ecommerce or online service business, you can also create your own “Business Agent” and sponsor it as an ad destination.

Here’s what it means for your brand (and, just as importantly, what it doesn’t).

1st-party data is starting to flow from ChatGPT

The headline, at least for our audience, is that Businesses in ChatGPT opens the door to first-party AI search data from OpenAI for the first time.

You can get aggregated mentions (website, not brand name only), profile views, and clicks to your website, straight from the AI platform 1.2 billion people use every week.

That being said, as with Google Search Console’s recent foray into AI visibility reporting, insights are limited.

More to the point: You don’t see which prompts you lost, why you lost them, which sources are shaping the answer, or what you need to do to improve performance (i.e., all the things we built Scrunch to help you do).

It reports basic metrics, but it doesn’t explain them or tell you how to fix them.

There’s also the obvious limitation: You only get data for ChatGPT. Not Perplexity, or Gemini, or Claude, or Google AI Overviews, or Google AI Mode, or Microsoft Copilot, or Grok, or…you get the picture.

You can’t use Businesses in ChatGPT to see what AI assistants outside of OpenAI’s ecosystem are saying about you and your competitors.

OpenAI thinks you should take AI search seriously

The Scrunch team is excited about this development for a couple of reasons.

First, it validates the AEO/GEO market as a whole. The company behind the most widely used AI assistant in the world now treats, “How does my brand show up in AI?” as something every business should proactively manage.

We couldn’t agree more. That’s why we’ve been building the category.

Second, it gives us new ways to help our customers.

ChatGPT profiles, product feeds, agents: These are all new things that brands will need to figure out and make sure they get right to compete.

We’re well placed to help our customers ensure theirs are complete, correct, and winning.

Our team is currently combing through the documentation (and claiming our own profile), as well as working out what Business Hub data we can bring into Scrunch, if possible, to inform our platform.

If you haven’t already, go claim your business in ChatGPT.

Getting set up is easy:

• Head to Business Hub and sign in with your ChatGPT account.
• Claim your existing listing, or create a profile if one doesn’t exist yet. Access is subject to eligibility and verification.
• Verify that you own the business. The method depends on your setup (Shopify merchants, for instance, can connect their store directly through Business Hub or the Shopify admin). Verified profiles get a blue check.
• Once you’re verified, fill in what matters: your website, description, products, pricing, and availability. Add your product feeds here, too.

From there, your mention, view, and click data should start flowing into the Business Hub.

Here’s the big picture

This isn’t surprising. We’ve been expecting AI assistants to make this move for some time.

Google did it with Search Console and Business Profile, and a whole industry grew on top of them.

Just remember: A limited view of one platform doesn’t replace a comprehensive view of every platform, or turn reporting into real next steps.

That’s why we’ll keep helping brands get visibility into how they show up across every AI assistant, where they win and lose, why, and what to do about it.

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