OpenAI's 'Businesses in ChatGPT' Beta Puts AI Agents Between Shops and 1.2 Billion Weekly Users

OpenAI says ChatGPT now reaches 1.2 billion users per week — and the company is turning that audience into a business directory with a new beta feature called "Businesses in ChatGPT." The move puts OpenAI in direct competition with Google's "MyBusiness," the free tool companies use to manage how they appear across Google Search and Maps.

The difference is the interface. Google's directory lives in search results and map listings. OpenAI's version lives inside a conversational AI, where business profiles, product data, and automated customer service agents can appear directly in a chat.

For OpenAI, the stakes are commercial. A directory of businesses with product feeds, click tracking, and ad-targetable agents creates the infrastructure for commerce and advertising inside ChatGPT — revenue streams that go beyond subscriptions. For businesses, the stakes are visibility: if a growing share of product questions moves into chat interfaces, companies that aren't present there risk becoming invisible at the exact moment a customer is deciding what to buy.

What can businesses actually do in the beta?

The feature set centers on a management tool OpenAI calls the Business Hub. Through it, companies register and manage their presence in ChatGPT. The core functions, according to OpenAI's announcement, break down into a few concrete pieces:

• Update and maintain business information
• Add product feeds that include prices and availability
• Track how often the business is mentioned in ChatGPT conversations
• Track how many clicks their website receives

That last pair of metrics matters. Mention tracking and click tracking give businesses the same kind of performance visibility they already expect from Google's directory tools — the feedback loop that tells a company whether its listing is working. Without it, a ChatGPT presence would be a black box.

The takeaway: OpenAI is replicating the basic mechanics of a business directory — listing, product data, analytics — inside a chat interface.

What is a Business Agent?

The more novel piece is what OpenAI calls "Business Agents." These are AI agents that operate inside ChatGPT on behalf of a company. According to OpenAI, they can:

• Answer customer questions in ChatGPT
• Help with product comparisons
• Serve as targets for ChatGPT ads

Each of those three functions points to a different ambition. Answering questions automates customer service. Product comparisons put the agent in the middle of the purchase decision itself — traditionally the job of a salesperson or a comparison-shopping site. And serving as a target for ChatGPT ads connects the agents to OpenAI's advertising business, making them a placement where promotional content can reach users mid-conversation.

The eligibility rules are narrow at launch. Only US e-commerce and online service providers qualify to create Business Agents in the current beta. OpenAI has not said when that eligibility widens, only that it plans to expand the offering to more markets and industries over time.

The takeaway: Business Agents are simultaneously a customer-service tool, a sales tool, and an ad surface — which is a lot for one beta feature to carry.

How does Shopify fit in?

Shopify merchants get a direct path in. OpenAI says Shopify store owners can connect their store directly to the system, rather than manually rebuilding their catalog inside the Business Hub.

That integration choice signals who OpenAI sees as its early adopters: online merchants with structured product data already in place. A Shopify store has prices, availability, and product information sitting in a standardized format, which is exactly what the product feeds in the Business Hub are designed to ingest.

The takeaway: by plugging into Shopify, OpenAI can populate its directory with real catalogs from day one instead of waiting for merchants to enter data by hand.

What happens to user conversations?

OpenAI addresses the obvious privacy question with a flat statement: user conversations aren't shared with businesses.

That claim is doing significant work. Businesses get aggregate signals — how often they're mentioned, how many clicks they get — but not, according to OpenAI, the underlying conversations those signals are drawn from. For a system where AI agents answer customer questions inside a consumer chatbot, that boundary between analytics and surveillance is the line that will determine whether users trust the feature.

The takeaway: businesses see the metrics, not the chats — at least as OpenAI has described the beta so far.

Why does this challenge Google directly?

Google My Business is free, and it works because Google Search and Maps are where people look for businesses. OpenAI's bet is that the looking is migrating. If 1.2 billion weekly users increasingly ask ChatGPT what to buy, where to buy it, and how two products compare, then the chat answer becomes the new storefront listing.

The structural difference cuts both ways. A conversational directory can answer a question in context — comparing products, fielding follow-ups — in a way a static map listing cannot. But Google's directory has decades of business adoption, and OpenAI's version is a US-limited beta with an unspecified expansion timeline.

The competitive question isn't whether OpenAI can copy Google's features; the Business Hub shows it can. The question is whether businesses decide that being discoverable inside ChatGPT is worth the effort of maintaining a second directory presence — and OpenAI's weekly user count is the argument that it is.

The takeaway: OpenAI is betting that discovery is moving from search boxes to conversations, and it has built the merchant tools to be waiting there.

What comes next?

OpenAI's stated plan is expansion: more markets and more industries over time, beyond the US e-commerce and online-service providers eligible today. The company has not published a timeline.

The direction is clear regardless. With Business Agents already designed as ad targets, and with Shopify integration giving merchants a one-step on-ramp, "Businesses in ChatGPT" is less an experiment than the first working version of a commerce-and-advertising layer for the chatbot — one that will grow more consequential as the beta's boundaries move.