OpenAI has spent a year trying to figure out how to make money from people shopping inside ChatGPT. Its newest answer looks a lot like something Google built two decades ago: the business listing.
On Tuesday, OpenAI rolled out a Business Hub, now in beta, where companies can create profiles and verify and update information about their products and services. If you’ve ever claimed a Google Business Profile for a restaurant or a shop, you know the idea. The business controls the facts, and the platform shows them to people who are searching.
There are two other pieces. Eligible companies can launch a specialized business agent, which lets ChatGPT users ask questions about that company and its products directly. And the Hub includes limited analytics: profile views, business mentions, website clicks, and similar metrics. That’s a light version of what Google Analytics and Search Console give site owners, and it matters because businesses will only invest in a channel they can measure.
Verification is the open question. Profiles require a formal process, but OpenAI hasn’t said what it involves. Benji Shomair, OpenAI’s VP of Monetization, told journalists there are “multiple verification methods that we use for different types of business in different markets.” That’s vague. Google’s verification system has been gamed for years by fake listings and spam, so how OpenAI handles it will tell us a lot about whether these profiles can be trusted.
The background here is important. OpenAI previously tried to make ChatGPT an e-commerce hub where users could buy products directly, with a commission model and even a checkout cart. The idea was to create a new revenue stream and challenge Amazon. It didn’t take off, and OpenAI retired it in March.
Business profiles are a quieter, more defensible bet. Instead of trying to own the transaction, OpenAI is trying to own the discovery step, which is where Google has made most of its money. The company said as much: people are turning to AI to discover products, compare options, and make decisions, and this is “an early step in bringing businesses more deeply into ChatGPT.”
The competitive picture is crowded. Google is pushing AI Mode and Gemini into the same shopping and local queries, and it already has the business data. Perplexity has experimented with shopping features. Microsoft’s Copilot draws on Bing’s listings. OpenAI has the user attention but not the structured business data, so asking companies to supply it themselves is the fastest way to build it.
For founders and marketers, the practical takeaway is simple. If ChatGPT is sending you traffic or mentioning your brand, you now have a way to correct what it says and see how often it happens. That’s worth claiming early, the same way businesses once rushed to claim their Google listings. Expect an AI-search optimization industry to form around these profiles quickly.
Is it a big deal? Not yet. It’s a beta, the analytics are limited, and the verification details are missing. But the strategic direction is clear. OpenAI wants to be the place people go to learn about a company, and it has learned that selling to them directly was the harder path. Whether businesses and users actually treat ChatGPT as that place is still unproven, and the failed checkout experiment is a reminder that adoption doesn’t follow just because the product exists.
