OpenAI launched Businesses in ChatGPT in beta this week. Eligible businesses that complete claiming and identity verification can see how often ChatGPT references their website, how many recorded clicks those links receive, and which topics those conversations cover. It’s early, but this is one of the most important moments in the history of AI Marketing: the first ground truth data an Answer Engine has given brands, and it marks a real step in our category’s maturity.

Our Head of Insights, Josh Blyskal, wrote a blog that breaks down exactly what the ChatGPT Business Hub measures, what it doesn't, and what he would do next as a marketer.

This blog explains how Profound brings this data into the bigger picture for customers running an AEO program.

Ground truth data is an unlock for marketers

The metrics provided by OpenAI in the ChatGPT Business Hub give brands ground truth data on how many times their website appeared in ChatGPT conversations, how many times it was clicked, and, most importantly, which topics triggered that mention.

This data matters for two reasons:

  1. Top-line KPIs: It gives brands first-party numbers they can trust and track as a core KPI.
  2. Topic discovery: Figuring out which topics and prompts to track is one of the biggest questions we help customers with. The Hub’s topic data is a good place to start.

The Hub tells you more about what's inside ChatGPT for your website. Acting on it takes a deeper understanding of why your brand was mentioned, which sources and citations shaped the answer, and what the context was, including the sentiment and whether the information was accurate. That’s the gap Profound fills. The rest of this post shows how Profound gives customers the full picture as a holistic AI marketing platform.

Enterprise marketing teams use Profound to make, manage, and measure marketing to agents

Marketing to agents as a discipline means knowing where you’re mentioned and where you’re not, who you’re up against, why you show up, and how you’re being described, whether the sentiment is positive or negative. And you need to know all of that across every Answer Engine, not just one. Profound gives you that full view, and a way to act on it.

  1. Across Answer Engines: Engines differ in which brands they name and which sources they cite. Profound runs tracked prompt sets across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, DeepSeek, and more, so you can compare performance across them and optimize for each.
  2. Brand mentions, with or without a link: ChatGPT Hub's mention metric measures how often your website appears in a response (or your location appears in a local search result). Profound tracks all brand-name mentions in collected responses, including appearance without a reference to your site, which happens nearly 50% of the time a brand is mentioned. And for businesses with multiple business and product lines, Profound tracks mentions for each asset within the entire hierarchy individually and collectively, with the granularity and custom reporting to slice them however you need.
  3. Performance by prompt: Profound shows each tracked prompt, whether you appeared, where you ranked in the answer, and how that changed over time. That helps you identify which buying questions you win and lose.
  4. Prompt Volumes: The ChatGPT Hub’s topics are a good starting point for topic discovery, which matters a lot for AEO, because it tells you what topics of conversation your website was cited in. Profound’s Prompt Volumes complements that with weekly demand estimates for all relevant topics and queries, including ones where you are or aren’t cited today but want to be, so you can see how big each opportunity is. And we use that data to go deeper than topics and identify the specific prompts we think you should track.
  5. Competitors: Profound reports your share of voice and rank against the competitors you track, broken down by prompt, topic, model, region, and persona. That shows you not just how often you appear, but how you stack up against everyone else in the answer.
  6. The sources behind every answer: AI answers draw on millions of sources across the web. Profound shows you the domains and pages that ChatGPT and other models cite for the prompts that matter, split into owned, earned, and competitor sources, and more. This is the key insight marketers need to take action and optimize for visibility.
  7. How AI describes your brand: Sentiment shows the stance and attributes models attach to your brand. FactCheck flags claims about you that are wrong or unverified, so you know what to investigate and correct in the information your business publishes.
  8. Your website analytics for AI: Agent Analytics shows which AI bots, like ChatGPT’s and others, visit which pages of your site and how often, along with the human visits each engine sends you. For e-commerce, Profound Shopping shows which of your products and merchants surface in AI shopping results.
  9. History and export: Profound provides all-time historical reporting through dashboards, API, and MCPs. These reports are customizable and can be automatically generated and sent where you need them via Agents.
  10. Action: Your AI Marketer has access to all of this data and helps you turn it into action. It builds AEO reports, creates and optimizes content and product pages (PDPs), analyzes campaigns, measures the outcomes, and proactively recommends what to do next.

What’s next

This is the first time brands have first-party, ground truth data on how they show up in ChatGPT, and we’re excited about the way it will push this space. We anticipate more updates to come from OpenAI and will continue to be your partner at the frontline of these opportunities. In the meantime, if your business is eligible, claim it this week. Then we’ll work with you to bring that data into Profound, so you get better topic selection, more accurate analytics, and ultimately better measurement and action.