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Marketers could soon find out how often ChatGPT users talk about them.
OpenAI is testing an analytics dashboard that counts how often a business shows up in ChatGPT’s answers and how many clicks those appearances send to its site. The tool sits inside a wider Business Hub that hasn’t launched yet. Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse, posted a screenshot on LinkedIn last week (November 6) after spotting a banner for the unreleased feature.
The banner asks businesses to “Claim your business in ChatGPT”, according to two seperate sources with knowledge of its workings. Once claimed, a business can track its mentions and keep its products and business information current. Claiming also unlocks what OpenAI calls a business agent, which answers customer questions using contact the business supplies. Getting in requires proof of authority to represent the business. Kaziukėnas said in the post that connecting a Shopify store is one way to do that.
According to his post, the dashboard logs impressions and clicks each day and plots them on a chart. It stops well short of what search marketers get from Google. Prompts stay hidden. So does user data and there’s no ranking against competitors. Kaziukėnas said he first saw traces of the feature in August.
Whatever OpenAI ships will land in a crowded market. Generative engine optimization vendors such as Profound and AdthenaHQ sell brands a read on their ChatGPT visibility, mostly by running prompts through the chatbot at scale and tracking what comes back. None of them has OpenAI’s own counts, though the beta dashboard also omits the prompts and competitor rankings those vendors sell. Kaziukėnas expects the two to work in tandem, with outside tools tracking prompts and OpenAI’s first-party data showing whether GEO strategies are working.
On paper the dashboard sits apart from ChatGPT ads as it deals in organic answers. Even so, OpenAI’s ads business has arguably the most to gain from its arrival. Once ChatGPT visibility shows up as a daily number, marketers will want that number to climb and the lever the company charges for it is a sponsored placement sitting next to the answer. Google ran the same play years ago. Business Profile listings put local businesses on its map. Search Console showed site owners how they performed in organic search and both gave Google’s sales teams an easier route to selling those businesses ads. OpenAI already has a self-serve ads manager and a measurement pixel Business Hub fills in the organic side.
Ads in ChatGPT went into testing in the U.S. in February. By September OpenAI was claiming a $1 billion annualized run rate, reached in under 200 days, and in late October it said more than 100,000 advertisers had run campaigns across 89 countries. Sustaining that growth means signing up businesses that have never bought ChatGPT ads and a claimed listing gives OpenAI a line to them.
OpenAI declined to comment for this story.
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