OpenAI introduced Businesses in ChatGPT beta on November 10, combining business listings with optional company-representing conversations.

The big change

  • Business Hub supports eligible listings where verification is available. Agents require eligible US ecommerce or online service businesses with websites, claim approval and identity verification.
  • Customers choose labeled agent conversations separate from ChatGPT's answers. Current agents link out for purchases, bookings and order checks; they cannot complete those tasks.
  • OpenAI's policy requires an agent to identify itself as AI representing the business, rather than posing as a human or independent adviser. That distinction tells a customer whose offerings and interests the conversation represents.

Whose answer is it?

The policy requires accurate, current information and forbids invented prices, offerings or guarantees and concealed material conditions. For a hypothetical delivery question, a useful answer would distinguish a seller's promised delivery window from a guarantee. If the seller has supplied no guarantee, configuring the agent to invent one would conflict with that rule.

The business terms distinguish preparing an agent from publishing it: creating, configuring or previewing one does not make it available to customers. Publishing is the business's choice, and does not itself authorize paid advertising. This creates separate decisions about what customers can use and whether the business will pay to promote it.

Businesses provide information and guidelines that inform their agents' answers. The terms put testing and configuration responsibility on the business and warn that agents can produce inaccurate or unexpected responses. A review process therefore needs to check answers against maintained information, not just whether the conversation sounds persuasive. These obligations are not evidence that every answer complies.

Aggregate reporting and personal details

Insights aggregate mentions and clicks above reporting thresholds, without individual prompts or chats. Blank metrics need not mean zero activity.

The terms separately define lead information as details users provide and authorize OpenAI to share with the business. Insight data explicitly excludes that category. These are different kinds of information with different conditions; a customer should check what a follow-up request would send and to whom.

The same policy bars pressure, false urgency and continued sales approaches after someone declines. It permits optional follow-up through an approved feature when a user chooses to provide necessary contact details. It forbids unnecessary or high-risk personal information and requires explicit authorization before information sharing or submissions on a user's behalf.

Advertising is another choice

Sponsored placements are labeled separately. The advertiser builder is rolling out over coming weeks; Business Hub and Ads Manager settings do not sync.

OpenAI's terms also promise no particular ranking, visibility or sales result. Businesses should decide what customer problem the maintained information helps solve and how they will check that it remains accurate.

BIG CHANGE has not independently tested the beta or a business's agent.