DEV Community: Meni Lebovich

How to claim your business on ChatGPT (Business Hub)

Meni Lebovich — Sat, 14 Nov 2026 09:13:28 +0000

On 10 November 2026, OpenAI opened Business Hub in beta: a place where a business can claim its profile in ChatGPT, correct its details and see how often it comes up. Here is who can use it today, how each step works, and what you agree to when you claim.

First: can you claim yet?

Business Hub launched in beta, and what you can do depends on what kind of business you run. VentureBeat reports that claiming and managing a profile is free at launch.

Local stores and restaurants. OpenAI's setup guide says they “can currently claim only an existing U.S. listing.”
Online businesses. An eligible online business can claim, or add itself, where ChatGPT is available and verification is supported.
Business Agents (a chat with your business inside ChatGPT) are only for eligible ecommerce and online service businesses in the US.
A website. OpenAI says claiming is initially available to businesses with a website.

Search Business Hub for your business. If it's there, claim it.

Don't sign up as an online store if you aren't one. OpenAI's policy says what you submit must truthfully represent the business.

What you can do today:

Check what ChatGPT already says about you. OpenAI says ChatGPT may show information about your business whether you claim it or not.
Make the facts on your own website and your Google Business Profile clear and the same everywhere. OpenAI says ChatGPT may also use other sources when it answers about you, claimed or not.
Prepare the items in the next section, so you have everything ready when you claim.

What to prepare

A ChatGPT account the business controls, such as one on a shared business email, not a staff member's personal account. The person who claims becomes the admin. Silktide reports that OpenAI locks profiles to the initial claiming account.
One way to prove the link to your business: the business phone number or email address on your listing, access to your website's domain settings (DNS), or your Shopify store.
For the ID check: a government-issued ID, your business registration details, and proof that you may represent the business. The name, address and registration or tax number must match your official records.
Your profile content: a short description, your category, your logo and a cover photo.

1. Find your business and claim it

Sign in to ChatGPT and open Business Hub from the sidebar, or go to chatgpt.com/business-hub. Search for your business by name, select the listing that matches, and confirm the account that will manage it.

If the listing shows Contact support, it's locked: ask OpenAI for access. If someone else already claimed it, open the profile, choose the ••• menu, then Dispute ownership, and prove with Persona that you represent the business.

2. Verify that the business is yours

OpenAI shows you the methods that fit your business. Its setup guide describes four:

Business phone: a code by text message or automated call to the number shown.
Business email: a code sent to the email address linked to the business.
Website domain: add the TXT record ChatGPT shows you to your domain's DNS, then select Verify domain. If someone else runs your website, ask them to add it. It can take a while to show up.
Shopify store: connect the store and log in.

OpenAI then reviews your claim and emails you its decision, or asks for more information.

3. Pass the ID check (Persona)

An approved claim puts the business in your Business Hub. To publish changes, see insights or create an agent, you also need to pass an identity check with Persona, a verification company. The blue check on your profile appears only after Persona approves you.

One warning from OpenAI's guide: if you create a new profile this way, OpenAI's approval publishes it at once, with no separate publish step. Only continue when your details are ready.

4. Update your details

Once both approvals are in, you can update your website, description, category, logo, delivery policy and return policy, and add a cover photo and other optional details. Shops can also connect a product feed with prices and stock.

Edits don't go live at once. OpenAI says it “reviews and publishes changes”, and updates can take time to appear in answers. Everything must be true and current: the policy names your hours, contact details, address and services.

5. Read your insights

Under Insights, OpenAI shows totals for the past 28 days:

Mentions. For a local business, a mention counts when ChatGPT shows a result for that location, even if nobody opens it. For an online business, it counts when ChatGPT references the business's website. Your name alone doesn't count.
Website clicks: how often people click through to your site.
Discovery topics: common themes in the answers that mentioned you.

You don't see the questions or the chats themselves. A blank number can mean there isn't enough activity to report yet, not zero. Silktide notes there's no export API for this data.

The terms worth reading before you claim

Using Business Hub means agreeing to the Businesses in ChatGPT Terms. Five points matter most to a small owner:

Use an account the business controls. Teammates and agencies can be added, each with their own ChatGPT account. Don't let an agency claim on its own account, since the profile may stay locked to whoever claimed first.
A published profile can't be removed. OpenAI Support “is unable to delete, unpublish, or hide a published profile”. Only drafts can be deleted.
OpenAI keeps the final say. It reviews every edit, and the terms say claiming “does not give you exclusive control over its contents”. OpenAI may keep a listing for you whether you claim it or not.
Your basic details stay licensed. The license on your name, address, contact details, category, hours and website is “perpetual and irrevocable”. The terms also let ChatGPT phone you on behalf of its users, with an opt-out, and include a promise not to bring certain claims about content on your own websites. Ask your lawyer if that matters to you.
No better placement is promised. In OpenAI's words: “Claiming does not guarantee higher placement or sales.”

Where BotOfMouth fits

Whether or not you can claim yet, ChatGPT keeps using other sources about you. When BrightLocal traced local searches in ChatGPT, business websites were 58% of the sources, and Gemini takes its facts about places “from Google Maps”. Our free check shows what the AI assistants say about your business today. Our paid plans then give you a to-do list, with ready-to-paste text, to make the facts on your own site and your Google profile clear and the same everywhere, so every assistant finds one version of you.

Nobody can promise that ChatGPT will name your business, and we don't. What you can make sure of is that when it looks, the facts are right.

Want this as a to-do list for your own business? Start with the free check at botofmouth.com.

Originally published on botofmouth.com.

Server-render the facts: a small-business site AI crawlers can read

Meni Lebovich — Thu, 12 Nov 2026 13:15:27 +0000

Before an AI assistant can name a business, one of its crawlers has to fetch a page and find the facts in it. For most of those crawlers, the page is the HTML your server sends, not what the browser builds afterwards. This is a short, vendor-sourced checklist for making that HTML count.

Know who is fetching

Each vendor runs separate user agents for search, for user-triggered fetches and for model training, and documents them. The search ones are the ones that decide whether a site can appear in answers.

OpenAI: OAI-SearchBot is “used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features”. GPTBot is for training. ChatGPT-User visits a page when a user asks, and “robots.txt rules may not apply” to it.
Anthropic: Claude-SearchBot indexes for search, Claude-User fetches at a user's request, and ClaudeBot collects training data. Disabling Claude-SearchBot “may reduce your site's visibility and accuracy in user search results.”
Perplexity: PerplexityBot “is designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity. It is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models.” Perplexity-User handles user requests.
Google: AI Overviews and AI Mode use the normal Search index. A page needs to be “indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet”, with “no additional technical requirements.” The separate Google-Extended token controls Gemini training and grounding, and “does not impact a site's inclusion in Google Search”.

Put the facts in the first response

Vercel and MERJ watched AI crawler traffic across Vercel's network and found that none of the major AI crawlers currently render JavaScript: not OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot. ChatGPT and Claude did fetch JavaScript files (11.50% and 23.84% of requests) but didn't run them. Only Gemini, through Googlebot, and AppleBot rendered pages. Their advice: “any important content should be server-rendered.”

Google says the same from its side: “server-side or pre-rendering is still a great idea because it makes your website faster for users and crawlers, and not all bots can run JavaScript.”

For a small business, the facts that must be in that first HTML response are few: the name, what the business does, the town or area it serves, the address, the phone number, the opening hours and the main services. Plain elements are enough:

<h1>Harbour Street Bakery</h1>
<p>Sourdough, pastries and coffee in Whitby, North Yorkshire.</p>
<p>Open Tuesday to Sunday, 7:00 to 15:00. Closed Monday.</p>
<address>
  12 Harbour Street, Whitby YO21 0AA<br>
  <a href="tel:+441947000000">01947 000000</a>
</address>

Static generation, server rendering or a plain HTML file all work. Rendering in the browser is fine for the extras: a chat widget, a live feed, a map. Then test what a crawler gets, before any JavaScript runs:

curl -s https://example.com/ | grep -c "01947 000000"
curl -s https://example.com/ | sed 's/<[^>]*>/ /g' | wc -w

If the phone number isn't found, or the word count is a few dozen for a page that looks full in a browser, the content arrives later from an API, and most assistants never see it. Text inside images and PDFs has the same problem: Google's checklist asks that “important content is available in textual form.”

robots.txt: let the search crawlers in

The file must sit at “/robots.txt” (all lowercase) in the top-level path, served as plain text, and Anthropic notes it is needed for every subdomain. OpenAI supports allowing OAI-SearchBot while disallowing GPTBot, so search and training are separate choices. A site that wants to appear in answers but stay out of training could use:

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
User-agent: PerplexityBot
User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /

User-agent: GPTBot
User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /

Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml

That last group is a choice, not a requirement; leaving it out allows everything. Three cautions:

robots.txt is not the only gate. Google asks that crawling be allowed “in robots.txt, and by any CDN or hosting infrastructure”. Cloudflare has blocked AI crawlers by default since July 2025 and asks every new domain whether to let them in. Check the firewall and bot settings too, and the server logs for 403s.
Think twice about Google-Extended. It controls training and also grounding in Gemini Apps, so blocking it may keep the site out of some Gemini answers even though Google Search is unaffected.
Changes take time. OpenAI says it “can take ~24 hours” after a robots.txt update for its search systems to adjust.

And robots.txt rules “are not a form of access authorization”. They are a request that well-behaved crawlers honour, not a lock.

A sitemap, and URLs that don't break

Google says a site of about 500 pages or fewer that is well linked internally might not need a sitemap. It costs little, though, and the AI crawlers have a reason to want one: in the Vercel data, ChatGPT spent 34.82% of its fetches on 404 pages and Claude 34.16%, against 8.22% for Googlebot. Vercel's advice is to keep proper redirects, up-to-date sitemaps and consistent URL patterns.

List the sitemap in robots.txt with a Sitemap: line, which Google says can go “anywhere in your robots.txt file”. When a page moves, redirect the old URL instead of letting it 404.

Structured data: the same facts, once more

Structured data is not a shortcut. Google says it “isn't required for generative AI search, and there's no special schema.org markup you need to add”, and that it should match the visible text on the page. It is still worth a few lines: use the most specific LocalBusiness subtype that fits, with the same name, address, phone and hours as the HTML above.

Ship it in the server response, like everything else. Vercel notes that content “included in the initial HTML response, like JSON data” can be read by crawlers that don't run JavaScript. JSON-LD injected by a tag manager after load is visible to Google, and possibly to no one else.

The checklist

The name, area, address, phone, hours and services are in the HTML the server sends.
robots.txt allows OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Googlebot, on every subdomain.
The CDN, firewall and host don't block them either. Check the logs.
A sitemap is listed in robots.txt, and moved pages redirect.
JSON-LD repeats the same facts, in the first response.
The same facts appear on the Google Business Profile and the main directories.

None of this guarantees a mention in any assistant's answer. It makes sure that, when a crawler comes looking, it finds the facts.

Prefer to have it done for you? Start with the free check at botofmouth.com.

First published on botofmouth.com.