Claim Your Business in ChatGPT. Do You Still Need a Website?
Just when I thought I had my arms around AI, ChatGPT dropped a business hub.
“Claim your business in ChatGPT.”
My first reaction was that I kind of love it. My second was a bigger question. If ChatGPT holds your info, your products and the conversation with your customer, do you still need a website?
What is ChatGPT Business Hub?
OpenAI just opened Business Hub in beta. You claim your business in ChatGPT and verify you own it. Then you update your details. If you sell products you can add a feed with prices and availability.
Some businesses can go a step further and publish a Business Agent. That’s a chatbot that speaks for your brand inside ChatGPT. For now it’s limited to US ecommerce and online service businesses.
What I like
For years we’ve played a guessing game. Write the page, tune the SEO and hope the machine pulls the right stuff. Now we get to hand it the info we want it to have.
And we get data. How often you’re mentioned. How many people click through to your site. What topics you show up for. As a marketer I’m all in on that.
The catch
The longer I looked, the clearer it got. The goal is to keep the whole trip inside ChatGPT. A shopper can compare brands, open your profile and ask your agent questions without ever visiting your site.
Claiming a profile is free. Sponsoring your agent and running ads are not. You can already pay to make your agent the place a ChatGPT ad sends people.
Three questions I keep seeing
Does claiming your business help your ChatGPT ranking?
No. OpenAI says ChatGPT still makes its own recommendations. A claimed profile guarantees nothing.
Is it free to claim your business in ChatGPT?
Claiming and the insights are free at launch. Sponsored agents and ads are paid.
Is this Google Business Profile for AI?
Close. But it only covers ChatGPT. It does nothing for Gemini, Perplexity, Claude or Google’s AI Overviews.
So do you still need a website?
Yes. But the website’s job is changing.
The hub now holds the facts. Prices, policies, products.
The website holds the proof. Your work, your story and the reasons someone should pick you. ChatGPT still reads it when it decides who to recommend. Other AI tools read it too.
And it’s the one place you own. A profile on someone else’s platform is rented ground. The rules can change any time.
So the site shrinks from “everything about us” to “the reason to choose us.” That’s a different site than most of us have. I wrote about rebuilding one in How Do You Put 40 Years of a Family Business Online?
What I’d do now
- Claim your profile. It costs nothing.
- Make your site and your profile say the same thing.
- Watch ChatGPT clicks next to your search traffic.
- Look hard at your website. Is it a list of facts or a reason to pick you?
Have you claimed yours yet? And is your website still your front door?
