ChatGPT Business Profile: What it brings Swiss SMEs and what to do now

It is your company's listing, which ChatGPT shows when you appear in an answer and someone clicks your name. It has nothing to do with the “ChatGPT Business” subscription. That is the paid plan for teams, and anyone who searches Google for the business profile often lands on its pages.

Picture it like this: a customer asks ChatGPT in the evening for a Swiss online shop for workwear. The answer names three companies, one of them yours. She clicks it and sees a profile with a description, logo and link to the website. Such a listing may already exist before you have heard of it, because ChatGPT also fills it with details from other sources. Claiming it gives you mainly one thing: the right to have a say.

The listing is managed in the Business Hub in ChatGPT's sidebar. After verification you can maintain your details there and add product feeds with prices and availability. OpenAI calls the whole thing an early step: it starts as a beta and is meant to expand to more markets and industries. It is not a small step all the same; according to OpenAI, 1.2 billion people use ChatGPT every week.

It is possible, but not yet confirmed. According to OpenAI, any eligible company can claim a listing if it is based where ChatGPT is available and the required verification is supported. Who is eligible depends on industry, location and OpenAI's checks. There is no country list, and at launch claiming is open first to companies with a website.

The clearest sign for companies outside the US comes from Italy. Flavio Copes had no listing yet, and on launch day the Business Hub offered to create one for him. First the Hub asked how the company serves its customers. On site and via an online shop were marked as available. The third option, service at the customer's location or remotely, said “Coming soon”. Copes noted that freelancers, agencies and consultants therefore have no choice yet. He picked the online shop. He did not complete the claim, and the Hub did not offer him a Business Agent or product feed: he could not use the agent, and the usual feed upload targets the US.

For local service providers this is the decisive point. If you visit customers or serve them remotely, such as a trades business, an agency or often a fiduciary firm, you belong to the category that was not yet open on launch day. According to its policy, OpenAI reserves the right to hold back entire categories. No field reports from Switzerland or the rest of the German-speaking region could be found up to 10 November.

For shops and restaurants, this applies for now only in the US: they can currently claim existing US listings only.

Above all, control over your own details. After claiming and the ID check you can change website, description, category, logo, cover image and delivery and return policies. OpenAI reviews the changes before they appear. The blue check comes only with an approved ID check; claiming alone is not enough. Team members and an agency can be added, each person with their own ChatGPT account.

With the profile you take on responsibility. Name, category, address or service area, opening hours, contact and offering must be correct. Invented reviews, unsubstantiated guarantees or concealed fees are prohibited. The details can be changed later, but the published profile itself cannot be withdrawn: according to the Help Center, support can neither delete nor hide it.

You sign in to ChatGPT, open the Business Hub in the sidebar, search for your company name and select the matching listing. Then you confirm your ChatGPT account and choose a verification method:

• Phone: a code by SMS or automated call.
• Company email: a code sent to the address linked to the company.
• Website domain: a TXT record that ChatGPT specifies and that has to go into your domain's DNS settings exactly as given. Anyone choosing this route needs someone who is allowed to change those settings. If someone else manages the domain, according to the Help Center that person has to set the record. It can take a while until the change takes effect, then “Verify domain” follows.
• Shopify: for merchants who connect their shop.

OpenAI reviews the claim and gets back by email. An ID check through the service Persona follows. Only once it is approved can you publish changes and see figures. An official ID, details of the company registration and proof that you may represent the company can be required. Name, address and any registration or tax number must match the official documents. OpenAI does not say how long this takes; the review time varies.

After the claim and ID check you see, summarised over the last 28 days, how often ChatGPT cites your website and how often it is clicked. Individual conversations stay invisible. According to the Help Center, this includes:

• Online mentions: They count only when ChatGPT names your website as a source. The company name alone is not enough.
• Local mentions: They count when ChatGPT shows a result for your location.
• Website clicks: Clicks from ChatGPT to your website.
• Topics: recurring content of the answers in which you are mentioned or cited. They do not reveal individual questions.

Empty fields are not a bad sign at the start. Values appear only above a minimum number of conversations that OpenAI does not state, and according to the Help Center an empty value does not necessarily mean nobody asked about you. Barry Schwartz initially saw no data after claiming, while others in the same article already reported figures.

The figures in the Hub therefore start empty and count strictly. A measurement of your own alongside remains valuable for that reason. Every month we put ten typical customer questions to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot and record who is named. Side by side, the two show whether anything actually moves after claiming.

The two profiles are listings on other companies' platforms; the website is your own source and the one that, according to a Swiss study, AI answers draw on most. Whether a Google business profile is worthwhile for your company is covered in the article My Business on Google. The ChatGPT profile, by contrast, is in beta and not yet reliably accessible for Swiss companies.

Two Swiss studies show where AI assistants look things up today. An analysis by Quaryan, reported by Inside IT in October, found 41 percent of 276 companies in not a single AI answer. The most cited source was the company's own homepage (54 to 60 percent); local.ch appeared in 30 percent of answers. A second study by Propus Codestudio, picked up by Netzwoche, found 63 percent of 98 German-speaking Swiss SMEs in no answer.

This contains the perspective that easily gets lost in the excitement about the launch. A profile corrects what ChatGPT shows about you. Whether you are named at all is still decided on your website and in the directories. Visibility in AI answers therefore reaches further than the ChatGPT business profile. Clear information in the code, as structured data provides, helps with that. Whether an llms.txt is worthwhile in addition depends on your website.