OpenAI is giving businesses a way to create profiles inside ChatGPT, so the chatbot can recommend specific companies when users ask for restaurants, contractors, software, or services. It's a small feature with a large implication: ChatGPT is positioning itself as a place people go to find businesses, not just a place they go to write emails or summarize documents.
The rollout lets businesses submit structured information — hours, services, location, pricing, specialties — that ChatGPT can draw on when answering a user's question. Previously, ChatGPT's knowledge of any given business came from whatever it had scraped from the open web, which meant outdated hours, missing details, or no mention at all. A formal profile system gives businesses a direct channel to shape what the AI says about them.
This follows a broader pattern across OpenAI's recent moves to make ChatGPT feel less like a chat window and more like a shopping and discovery layer. The company has spent much of the past year adding features like in-chat checkout, product comparisons, and shopping-style result cards. Business profiles are the next logical piece: if ChatGPT is going to recommend where to eat or who to hire, it needs a reliable way to know who's actually open, nearby, and relevant.
The move also puts ChatGPT in territory that Google has occupied for two decades through Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business). Google built an entire advertising and verification ecosystem around that product, and it remains one of the most consequential pieces of software for local business visibility. OpenAI appears to be building a lightweight version of the same idea, except the output isn't a map pin — it's a sentence inside a conversation.
This fits into a wider shift sometimes called answer engine optimization, or AEO — the practice of structuring business information so AI tools surface it correctly, the same way SEO shaped how businesses wrote content for Google search results. Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, and Google's own AI Overviews have all been experimenting with similar business-facing features over the past year, each trying to become the default place people ask "where should I go" or "who should I hire."
Historically, when a platform opens a new discovery channel, early participants tend to get outsized visibility simply because there's less competition for the algorithm's attention. That was true of early Google Business Profile listings, early App Store optimization, and early Yelp claims. It's also common for these free discovery tools to introduce paid placement or verified-badge tiers once adoption grows — something to watch for here, even though OpenAI hasn't announced advertising plans for this feature yet.
For small businesses, the practical task this week is simple: check what ChatGPT currently says about your business by asking it directly, and compare that to what's accurate. If the information is wrong or absent, that's a signal to prioritize setting up a profile once it's available in your region or industry category, rather than waiting.
It's also worth auditing the basics AI models tend to pull from — your website, your Google Business Profile, and major directories — since inconsistent hours or addresses across those sources are a common reason AI tools give incorrect answers about a business.
The tradeoffs are still unclear. Visibility inside ChatGPT doesn't yet carry the same measurable traffic signals as a Google search click, so businesses can't easily track return on effort the way they can with search rankings or ad spend. There's also no public word yet on whether OpenAI will rank businesses by relevance, proximity, user ratings, or something else entirely — a detail that will matter a great deal once more businesses start competing for the same recommendation.
Watch for three things in the coming months: whether OpenAI opens profile creation broadly or gates it to select industries first, whether any paid promotion options appear, and whether competitors like Google or Perplexity respond with comparable business-facing tools of their own.
The bottom line: ChatGPT is quietly becoming a place where customers find businesses, not just chat with an assistant, and the businesses that get their information right early are likely to have an advantage before the space gets crowded or monetized.