You already know some customers ask ChatGPT who to call before they ever touch Google. A homeowner asks it for a reliable plumber. A parent asks it which dentist is taking new patients. Right now you have no way to see whether ChatGPT mentions your business in those answers. That is about to change.
What OpenAI is building
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is working on a tool that lets you claim your business inside ChatGPT. The idea is similar to Google Search Console, Google's free tool that shows how your website performs in search results. The story was reported by Search Engine Roundtable, a long running search industry news site, after Juozas Kaziukėnas spotted the feature and posted screenshots on LinkedIn.
According to those screenshots, claiming your business will let you do three things. You can track how often your business is mentioned in ChatGPT conversations. You can add your latest products and keep your business info up to date. And you can let a business agent, meaning an AI assistant that speaks for your company, answer customer questions with context you control.
What the tool shows, and what it hides
Kaziukėnas says the tool measures impressions and clicks. In plain English, that is the number of times your business appeared in ChatGPT responses and the number of clicks on links to your website. It tracks those events daily and shows them as a chart.
It will not show prompt data, meaning the actual questions people typed. It will not show user data or any comparison against competitors. So it tells you how often you appeared and got clicked, without telling you why the numbers moved.
The feature sits inside a larger Business Hub and is only available to businesses that have verified ownership, for example by connecting a Shopify store, Shopify being a popular online store platform. Kaziukėnas saw the first steps of this back in August, and a new banner suggests it is getting close to launch. It also appears to be separate from ChatGPT ads. This tool is about organic answers, the recommendations ChatGPT gives without anyone paying for placement.
My take
The part that matters most here is verification. OpenAI is building a front door where businesses prove they own their listing and then control what ChatGPT says about them. In my experience, the owners who claimed their Google Business Profile early, that is the free listing that puts your business on Google Maps and search, collected years of reviews and data before their competitors paid attention. I expect a similar head start for owners who claim their business in ChatGPT the moment it opens.
The context you control piece deserves attention too. Today, ChatGPT describes your clinic or your trades business from whatever it can find online, accurate or not. If this ships as described, you get to feed it your hours, your services, and your offers directly. Wrong hours or an outdated service list in an AI answer costs you real phone calls, so having a lever to fix that is worth something.
The limits are real. With no prompt data and no competitor benchmarks, the tool will not explain why your mentions rise or fall. The way I see it, that is an acceptable trade for now. First-party counts straight from OpenAI beat the guesswork most third-party AI tracking tools are selling, and Kaziukėnas makes the same point, that paired with external prompt tracking this becomes a reliable way to tell if your AI visibility work is paying off.
One caution. My bet is that ChatGPT mentions are still a small share of leads for most local service businesses right now. As a Google and Meta Partner for over 10 years, we have watched plenty of new channels get hyped while the boring ones kept producing the actual booked jobs. Do the cheap preparation for ChatGPT this month, and keep your Google and Meta campaigns funded, because that is where the volume still lives.
How to prepare your business
1. Clean up your business info everywhere it appears online this week: hours, services, service area, and contact details.
2. Ask every new lead how they found you, and write down any mention of ChatGPT.
3. Watch for the claim your business option in ChatGPT and verify ownership as soon as it opens.
4. Keep your website's service pages current, since AI answers pull from what you publish.
If you want a plan for where AI search fits alongside your Google and Meta ads, book a call with us and we will map it out together.
