On 10 November, OpenAI launched a beta of ChatGPT’s features for businesses: a business claims its listing in a dashboard called Business Hub, and once verified, it can see how many times it was mentioned in ChatGPT’s answers and how many website clicks it got over the past 28 days. Now that even OpenAI has started counting this for businesses, whether the answer includes you when customers ask AI who’s good in your line of business is now something that the platforms count. But this dashboard won’t show you what customers asked or the wording of the answers that describe you, and OpenAI says plainly that claiming your business doesn’t guarantee more visibility. So our position is that you shouldn’t wait until businesses in Taiwan can claim a listing, and you shouldn’t assume that claiming it is enough either: start checking how the answers describe you now, and start keeping a record of them.

What happened

OpenAI announced on 10 November that it was launching Businesses in ChatGPT in beta, saying that ChatGPT has 1.2 billion weekly users. Once a business has claimed its listing in Business Hub and been verified, it can update its details, and a business that sells products can also upload a product feed with prices and availability. Eligible ecommerce and online service businesses in the US can also set up a Business Agent, which customers can talk to in ChatGPT to ask about products and return policies.

According to OpenAI’s help page, the dashboard’s figures are the number of mentions and website clicks over the past 28 days, along with a summary of the topics that the answers mentioning you tend to cover. The help page also explains what counts as a mention: for an online business, ChatGPT has to reference its website, and naming the brand alone doesn’t count; for a local business, it counts whenever ChatGPT shows that location in a result, even if the customer doesn’t open the listing. Businesses can’t see what individual customers asked or said, and when activity hasn’t reached the reporting threshold or data is still being collected, a figure may be blank, which OpenAI says doesn’t necessarily mean zero.

Can businesses in Taiwan claim a listing now? OpenAI says that eligible businesses can claim a listing where ChatGPT is available and the required verification is supported, but it doesn’t list any countries. The help page also says that local stores and restaurants can currently claim only an existing U.S. listing, so a shop in Taiwan can’t claim one for now; whether an online business can depends on its location and type. PPC Land reported that at least one business outside the US was put on a waitlist when it tried to claim its listing on launch day. We haven’t yet found anyone who has tested this for a business in Taiwan.

Why it matters to you

In a survey that the Fair Trade Commission published on 29 October, 56.6% of respondents who had used generative AI said that ChatGPT was the one that they mainly used. The survey didn’t ask about using AI to find businesses, but going by that share, if customers ask AI who’s good in your line of business, ChatGPT is the one that they’re most likely to open. Bing and Google have each already started to offer part of this kind of data, and now ChatGPT has started to as well, even if it’s still in beta. Once the platforms themselves are counting how often you appear in AI answers, that count becomes a score that you can put a number on, just like where you rank on Google.

OpenAI’s help page itself says two things that show why you can’t rely on this dashboard alone. First, claiming your business lets you manage the information that you provide, but it doesn’t guarantee more visibility or give you direct control over ChatGPT’s own recommendations. Second, ChatGPT may also use other sources when it answers questions about your business, and changing your details doesn’t mean that every answer will reflect the change straight away. In other words, how ChatGPT describes you doesn’t depend only on the few fields that you fill in on the dashboard.

Even once businesses in Taiwan can use it, this dashboard only tells you half the story. It counts how many times you were mentioned and how many clicks your website got; it doesn’t give you what customers asked or the wording of the answers that describe you.

Say you run a plumbing and electrical business in Dali, Taichung. Suppose businesses in Taiwan can claim a listing one day, you claim yours and you see that you were mentioned quite a bit more often last month. But one of those times, the customer asked, “A pipe has burst in the middle of the night in Dali. Who can come and fix it right away?” The answer did list you, but it said that you don’t take emergency call-outs, when you do, so the customer read it and called someone else. Under OpenAI’s rules, a local business counts as mentioned whenever it’s listed, so on the dashboard this looks exactly the same as a genuine recommendation.

What to do about it

Act now, and don’t wait until businesses in Taiwan can claim a listing. If a customer asks ChatGPT a question like “Which plumber in Dali takes call-outs in the middle of the night?”, it will answer today, and the only things that can go into that answer are what it can read, which OpenAI says may include other sources. The dashboard only records the counts afterwards: whether an answer includes you, and how it describes you, is already being decided every time ChatGPT answers. If you only start sorting it out once the numbers appear, you’re starting from behind.

More pressing than the counts is getting a clear look at how you come across in the answers, and starting to keep a record. The dashboard only covers the past 28 days, so to make sense of its counts you’ll need a longer record to compare them with: how AI has been answering the questions that your customers ask over the past few months. You can’t go back this month and get last month’s answers, so that record can’t be filled in after the fact, and every month that you start later is a month missing from it.

If you want to know how ChatGPT writes about you now, set up a demo with one of our consultants and see whether you recognise yourself in it. The consultant opens ChatGPT there and then and asks the kind of question that customers in your line of business tend to ask, like the customer above, and you see the exact wording of the answer on the spot, which is the part that the dashboard doesn’t show you. The consultant also takes you through your website’s GEO audit score: that’s geoweb.tw’s free audit, which checks how well AI can understand your site.

That record only becomes useful as it builds up over time, and the earlier you start keeping it, the more months you’ll have to compare. We regularly put the same set of questions to ChatGPT, Gemini and other leading AI engines and write down each answer; we fix your website’s content, and we bring what other websites say about you into line with your site. We call this whole set of work managed GEO.

Further reading