Bart Dunweg4 min readOn November 10, OpenAI opened Business Hub, a place where a company can claim its own profile in ChatGPT. Until then you could only hope ChatGPT had read you well. We started our own claim this week and found that the claim is the small part of the work.
What Business Hub is
It is a page in ChatGPT where you look up your company, say it is yours and prove it. OpenAI lists the steps in Setting up your business on ChatGPT. Once the claim is approved and a person has verified who they are, you can correct your business details and see how often ChatGPT mentioned you and how many people clicked through to your site. It is a beta, so expect the details to move.
What the claim asks
Three things, in this order.
Proof that the domain is yours. ChatGPT gives you a TXT record to add to your DNS, the settings that say where your domain leads. Ours took a few minutes to add and could be read from outside within seconds. One thing to watch: most DNS panels add the domain themselves, so you type the record's short name and not the full address, or the check fails.
A review. After the domain check the claim is pending and OpenAI sends its decision by email. A founder who claimed on the day it opened was still waiting two days later.
A person. Before anyone can publish a change or see the figures, someone has to verify their identity with an ID. So decide first whose account the profile hangs on. Pick someone who will still be there in three years.
What it does not do
A claimed profile does not make ChatGPT recommend you. It lets you correct the facts ChatGPT shows about you. What it answers when someone asks which studio designs a planning app for installers still comes from what it could read: your own pages and what others wrote about you.
That founder found this out by accident. His server had been turning ChatGPT's crawler away with an error, and he only noticed because he checked before claiming. A profile on top of a site that cannot be read corrects an address and nothing else.
What to fix before you claim
Check that ChatGPT can read you. Ask it, logged out, to open your home page and summarize it. If it cannot, your server or your robots file is turning it away, and no profile will help.
Put the answer in the page itself. ChatGPT reads the page as the server sends it and runs no scripts. A price that only shows after a click, or a list of services that loads later, is not there for it.
Say the same thing everywhere. The same name, the same address and the same one-line description on your site, your LinkedIn page and every directory. Two spellings of one address read as two companies. We found a second site that named ours with www in front, and fixed that first.
Say what you do in the words a customer would type. We call ourselves a digital product studio. Someone looking for us asks who can design an app their planners will use.
What we would do this week
Claim the profile. It costs nothing, takes an afternoon and nobody else should hold it. Then spend the rest of the week on the fixes above. They decide what ChatGPT says about you, and they decide it for every other answer engine too.