Claim Your Business in ChatGPT Before Somebody Else Does

ChatGPT is already answering questions about your company. Today. A homeowner in your service area asks it who to call for a water heater that quit, and it answers from whatever it can find about you online. You had no say in any of it.

On November 10 OpenAI changed that. There is a new dashboard called Business Hub where you claim your business, correct what ChatGPT holds about you, and see how often it mentions you. It is free and it takes about 15 minutes.

Here is the honest reason to do it this month. Not more leads. Not better placement. Right now, claiming is mostly about making sure nobody else claims your listing first.

Why that matters more for a contractor

For a lot of businesses this is housekeeping. For home services contractors it is not, for four reasons.

Your name is the asset. You are not selling a product with a spec sheet somebody can compare. A homeowner asks for a plumber and what comes back is a short list of company names. If yours shows up attached to a disconnected number, the wrong service area, or hours you stopped keeping two years ago, the call goes to the next name on the list. There is no page two to fix it on.

There is already a version of you in there. ChatGPT shows information about businesses whether or not they ever claimed a profile. So a description of your company exists right now, built from whatever the web says about you, and nobody at your shop wrote a word of it.

Verification on this is brand new. People in the search industry raised concerns about it the day it launched, specifically that weak verification could let a listing get claimed by the wrong party. Claiming your own is how that stops being your problem.

And there is no undo. Once a profile is published, OpenAI says its support team cannot delete it, unpublish it, or hide it. If somebody else gets to your listing first, you are not deleting their version of your company. You are filing an ownership dispute and completing an ID check to try to take it back.

One more thing worth saying out loud. The companies most likely to move on this fast are the ones with marketing departments. The private-equity-backed groups buying up HVAC and plumbing companies in your market usually have somebody whose job is exactly this kind of work. An owner running four trucks does not. That gap is the whole argument for spending 15 minutes on it this month instead of next year.

What you actually get

Three things, and they are modest.

• A claimed profile with a verified badge, once you pass the ID check.
• Control of your own facts. Website, business description, category, logo, your policies.
• Some numbers. How often ChatGPT mentions you, how often people click through to your site, and the general themes of those conversations.

What you do not get

This is the part nobody selling you something will mention.

• Claiming does not get you recommended more. OpenAI says it in their own documentation — claiming does not guarantee higher placement or sales. Paying them for ads does not influence their answers either.
• You do not get the prompts. You will never see what people actually typed. You get themes, not questions.
• You do not get competitor data. No share of voice, no rankings, nothing about where you sit against the other three HVAC companies in town.
• You do not get the conversational agent. The chat-with-the-business feature in the launch coverage is limited to US ecommerce and online service companies right now. If you run trucks, you are not eligible yet.

How to claim it

1. Sign in to ChatGPT with an account your company owns. Not your personal Gmail. Whoever signs in becomes the admin on that profile, so use an account that will still be yours in five years.
2. Go to chatgpt.com/business-hub, or open Business Hub from the ChatGPT sidebar.
3. Search your business name and pick your listing.
4. Verify that you represent the business. You get a code by phone or business email, or you add a TXT record to your website’s DNS.
5. Wait. OpenAI reviews it and emails you a decision. Days, not hours.
6. Complete an ID check through Persona. Driver license or passport, plus your business registration info.
7. Fill in your profile, then add your team or your marketing agency.

Three things that trip contractors up

The phone number. Verifying by phone sends a code to the number on your listing. If that is a tracking number your marketing company set up, the code goes somewhere nobody is watching. Check it before you pick that option.

The DNS record. If you verify by domain, ChatGPT gives you three values to add to your website’s DNS. Most DNS providers add your domain to the end of the host field automatically, so pasting the whole string gives you a doubled domain and a failed check. If whoever manages your website can do this for you, hand it to them.

The ID check is yours. OpenAI requires the owner or somebody authorized to represent the company. Your marketing agency cannot do this part for you, and you should be suspicious of one that offers to.

If you run more than one brand or location

Each one gets claimed separately. There is no central management across a parent company’s brands and locations yet, and claiming the main brand does not claim the locations under it. Two brands and five locations is seven claims, not one.

One more thing

If somebody calls you this month offering a guaranteed ChatGPT listing for a monthly fee, hang up. Claiming is free, it is self-service, and nobody can buy placement in ChatGPT’s answers.

Looking to grow your brand? Get Ferocious.

Paid media, SEO and local listings for home services contractors. HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing. Twenty years at it.

We get judged on return on ad spend, and it gets measured in Searchlight, which is a third party, not our own reporting.

If that sounds like what you need, let’s talk.