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REGISTER The sponsored link had a good run. Its successor might talk back.
OpenAI certainly thinks so. Businesses can now claim a profile in ChatGPT through a new Business Hub, get verified and feed in product and company details. In the U.S. (for now), e-commerce and online services businesses can go a step further and publish a business agent – a separately labelled chat that speaks for the brand once a user wants to dig into a product. OpenAI’s vp of monetization Benji Shomair declined to share a timeline for further rollout.
He did, however, clarify that the business agent is the free, organic way into a format Digiday reported on in September, when OpenAI started testing it as a paid ad.
“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.”
So, OpenAI has built two routes into the same conversation for brands, and only one of them costs money. One through ChatGPT’s organic recommendations, and the other via paid placements.
Shomair said early testing of sponsored agents had shown “promising results,” particularly in the depth of conversations between consumers and businesses.
“When a consumer chooses to engage more deeply with our business, there’s a high level of intent there,” he said.
Shomair described typical consumer use cases as working through product choices, weighing up size, colour and price before exploring related purchases. For businesses, that could result in turning an initial product enquiry into a bigger basket, and ultimately a deeper customer relationship.
When the shopper is ready to pay, the agent waves them off to the brand’s own site, because “it’s up to the business on how they want to close the transaction,” said Shomair.
Whatever got said before that point stays with OpenAI. Brands hoping to read back 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 hold of the agent itself too. It’s built from the instructions and product feed a business supplies with no room for an in-house version. “We aren’t allowing folks to bring their own agents,” said Shomair.
The rest of the Business Hub sits under Insights, the the analytics dashboard-type product that Digiday reported on this week — the beta shows mentions, views and website clicks, plus discovery topics.
“Those are common themes in conversations where ChatGPT cites the business’s site,” an OpenAI spokesperson confirmed to Digiday. “Businesses don’t see individual prompts or chats. Share of voice isn’t part of this beta.”
How mentions are tracked depends on the type of business. For local businesses, a mention counts when ChatGPT shows a result for that location. For an online business, it counts when ChatGPT references the business’s website.
“Just naming the brand doesn’t count,” the spokesperson said. “Website clicks are clicks on links from supported ChatGPT surfaces, not completed visits or purchases. And low-volume counts may be withheld for privacy.”
OpenAI declined to say how long mentions are tracked. An ad exec with access to Insights within the Business Hub did share that the chart within the feature shows everything within the past seven or 28 days.
Accuracast’s group CEO Farhad Divecha said that his team has been reliant on tools like Peec,.AI, Otterly.AI or Semrush to guesstimate brand visibility on ChatGPT as well as other AI platforms. But he noted that they are all using approximations from Google search data, third-party traffic estimators and their own data modeling tools, and none have access to 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, and whether these tools will be able to adapt and incorporate the OpenAI data,” Divecha said. “If their estimation data was wildly erroneous, that will make us rethink paying for those tools.”
The implications extend beyond the accuracy of individual tools. OpenAI’s decision to share its own data could also shift the balance of power in the growing AI visibility industry. As Sonata Insights’ founder and chief analyst Debra Aho Williamson pointed out, the entire AI visibility (AEO/GEO) industry is built on third-party research (and some guesswork) about what helps a brand show up in an answer.
“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.”
Business Hub and agents are free for now but Shomair didn’t rule out a paid model in the future.
“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 needs to“maintain objectivity,” said Shomair, claiming a business “should not have an impact on how frequently it appears.”
That doesn’t mean the information is irrelevant to visibility though. Shomair said it could help ChatGPT surface a business in more relevant conversations since the platform would have a clearer picture of what that business offers.
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