OpenAI Gives Brands a Free Path Into ChatGPT Chats It Also Sells

OpenAI has opened two doors into the same ChatGPT conversation, and only one of them costs money. Businesses can now claim a profile through a new Business Hub, get verified, and feed in product and company details — free. In the U.S., for now, e-commerce and online services businesses can go further and publish a business agent: a separately labelled chat that speaks for the brand once a user wants to dig into a product.

Benji Shomair, OpenAI's vp of monetization, declined to give a timeline for wider rollout. But he did clarify the relationship between the free feature and the paid format Digiday reported OpenAI was testing as an ad in September.

"Think of the business agent as the organic experience," Shomair said during a press briefing. "The sponsored agent is the paid experience, but the agent that sits behind it should be the same."

The sponsored link had a good run. Its successor talks back.

What do the agents actually do?

Shomair said early testing of sponsored agents showed "promising results," particularly in conversation depth between consumers and businesses. The intent signal is the point.

"When a consumer chooses to engage more deeply with our business, there's a high level of intent there," he said.

Typical use cases, he explained, involve shoppers working through product choices — size, color, price — before exploring related purchases. For a business, that could mean turning an initial inquiry into a bigger basket and a longer customer relationship.

At checkout, the agent hands off. It waves the shopper to the brand's own site, because "it's up to the business on how they want to close the transaction," Shomair said.

The takeaway: agents handle the conversation, brands handle the sale.

What do brands get to see?

Very little, by design. Whatever got said before the handoff stays with OpenAI. Brands hoping to read their agents' transcripts get themes instead.

"The only insight provided today are the ones we sort of shared there initially, which are the themes of the conversations where you're appearing," Shomair said.

OpenAI keeps the agent itself, too. It's built from the instructions and product feed a business supplies. "We aren't allowing folks to bring their own agents," he said.

The rest of the Business Hub sits under Insights, the analytics dashboard product Digiday reported on this week. The beta shows mentions, views, website clicks, and discovery topics — common themes in conversations where ChatGPT cites the business's site.

The counting rules matter:

• Local business: a mention counts when ChatGPT shows a result for that location
• Online business: a mention counts when ChatGPT references the business's website
• "Just naming the brand doesn't count," an OpenAI spokesperson said
• Website clicks are clicks on links from supported ChatGPT surfaces — not completed visits or purchases
• Low-volume counts may be withheld for privacy; share of voice isn't in this beta

Businesses don't see individual prompts or chats. OpenAI wouldn't say how long mentions are tracked, though one ad exec with Insights access said the charts show the past seven or 28 days.

Does first-party data break the visibility tools?

Until now, agencies have gamed this out blind. Farhad Divecha, group CEO of Accuracast, said his team relied on tools like Peec AI, Otterly.AI and Semrush to estimate brand visibility on ChatGPT and other platforms — all built on Google search data, third-party traffic estimators and their own modeling. None had original data from the source.

"Now that OpenAI is making their own mentions data available, we're very interested to see how far off these tools were from the actual data from ChatGPT," Divecha said. "If their estimation data was wildly erroneous, that will make us rethink paying for those tools."

Debra Aho Williamson, founder and chief analyst at Sonata Insights, framed the bigger shift. The AI visibility industry (AEO/GEO — optimization tactics for appearing in AI-generated answers) runs on third-party research and guesswork about what makes a brand show up.

"The fact that OpenAI will now share insights itself will take some of the power away from the third-party companies," she said. "But OpenAI isn't going to share everything it knows, and ChatGPT is only one of several AI platforms, so demand for what the AI visibility companies offer will remain strong."

Is it free forever — and does it boost rankings?

Business Hub and agents are free for now. Shomair didn't rule out a paid model. "In terms of where they develop in the future, I think it'll depend on the directions that they go," he said.

What none of it buys is a leg-up in ChatGPT's recommendations. The core product must "maintain objectivity," Shomair said, claiming a business "should not have an impact on how frequently it appears."

Still, the information isn't irrelevant to visibility. Better data could help ChatGPT surface a business in more relevant conversations, he said, because the platform would have a clearer picture of what that business offers.

In plain terms: no paid ranking, but a sharper match between what you sell and who's asking.