# OpenAI Lets Businesses Claim Their ChatGPT Profiles and Deploy Their Own Agents, and Sell Ads That Point to Them

Times of AI Desk · 2026-11-11 · Products

[https://timesof.ai/2026/11/openai-businesses-in-chatgpt-business-hub-agents-ads-beta](https://timesof.ai/2026/11/openai-businesses-in-chatgpt-business-hub-agents-ads-beta)

> OpenAI launched Businesses in ChatGPT in beta on November 10. Through Business Hub, eligible companies can claim and verify their profile, update details and product feeds, and see aggregated mentions, website clicks and discovery topics. Eligible U.S. ecommerce and online-service businesses can also build Business Agents that users can chat with in a labeled, separate conversation, and can sponsor those agents as destinations for ChatGPT Ads. OpenAI did not detail its verification methods.

OpenAI is building the business layer that made web search a marketing channel: a profile companies can claim, analytics on how often they come up, and a paid way to steer users toward them. The new piece is that the destination is an agent the business controls, inside ChatGPT.

## What launched

OpenAI introduced **Businesses in ChatGPT** in beta on **November 10**. Through **Business Hub**, any eligible business located where ChatGPT is available can claim its organisation and, once verified, update key details and add self-service **product feeds with pricing and availability**, OpenAI said. Shopify merchants can connect from Business Hub or the Shopify admin to speed up verification, and existing enterprise customers and advertisers can go through their OpenAI representative.

Business Hub also shows **aggregated insights**: how often a business is mentioned, how many website clicks it receives from ChatGPT, and the "discovery topics" in conversations where its site is cited. OpenAI says it does not share users' conversations or Business Agent chats with businesses, and that insights appear only above minimum-volume thresholds.

## Agents, and ads that point to them

After claiming a profile, eligible organisations can build, test and launch a **Business Agent**. When a business appears in a ChatGPT answer, a user can open its profile and choose to chat with the agent, for example to compare two products. OpenAI says that conversation is **clearly labeled, separate** from the user's original chat and distinct from ChatGPT's own answers. Business Agents are available now to eligible **ecommerce and online-service businesses in the U.S.**

Businesses can also **sponsor** their Business Agent and use it as the destination for **ChatGPT Ads**; OpenAI says sponsored placements are labeled and separate from ChatGPT's responses. That ties the new product to an ad business OpenAI said in August had reached a [$1 billion annualised run rate](https://timesof.ai/2026/08/openai-chatgpt-ads-1-billion-run-rate).

OpenAI cites **1.2 billion** weekly ChatGPT users as the audience, the figure its consumer lead gave earlier this month alongside a claim that [ChatGPT handles about a fifth of Google's search volume](https://timesof.ai/2026/11/openai-chatgpt-search-volume-fifth-of-google-1-2b-weekly-users).

## Claims vs checks

TechCrunch compared the profiles and analytics to what Google already offers businesses, and noted that OpenAI retired an earlier commission-based checkout effort in March after it failed to take off. OpenAI's VP of monetization, **Benji Shomair**, told reporters there are "multiple verification methods that we use for different types of business in different markets," TechCrunch reported; The Verge said OpenAI is not sharing specifics.

## Limits

- The product is in beta and OpenAI has not published eligibility rules beyond the categories it links to, adoption numbers, or pricing for sponsored agents.
- How verification works, and how ChatGPT decides which businesses appear in answers, has not been disclosed.
- The 1.2 billion weekly-user figure is OpenAI's own.

## Sources

- [OpenAI: Introducing Businesses in ChatGPT (November 10, 2026)](https://openai.com/index/introducing-businesses-chatgpt)
- [The Verge: ChatGPT is getting verified AI 'Business Agents' (November 10, 2026)](https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/1030552/openai-chatgpt-business-agents-hub)
- [TechCrunch: OpenAI rolls out new business profiles, making ChatGPT just a little bit more like Google (November 10, 2026)](https://techcrunch.com/2026/11/10/openai-rolls-out-new-business-profiles-making-chatgpt-just-a-little-bit-more-like-google/)