ChatGPT now lets brands claim a profile and run their own agent. Would you put yours there?

For a lot of products, the first real conversation a customer has might soon be with your agent inside someone else's app. I'm not sure how I feel about that, and I'd like to hear how other makers are thinking about it.

This week OpenAI opened a beta it calls Businesses in ChatGPT. From OpenAI's announcement as summarised by Techstrong.ai and Dynamic Business (OpenAI's own page wouldn't load for me, so this is secondhand), it has two parts.

Business Hub lets a verified business claim its ChatGPT profile, fix outdated information and connect a product feed with prices and availability. It's open in markets where ChatGPT is available, and verification is required before you can publish changes, connect a feed, see analytics or build an agent. Shopify stores can connect through the Shopify admin.

Business Agents are the more interesting part. Eligible US ecommerce and online-service businesses can build an agent that answers questions about their products and policies, inside limits and a knowledge base the business sets. A shopper comparing options in ChatGPT can step into a brand's agent, which opens as a separate, labelled conversation, so the independent answer and the company's own representative aren't mixed together. OpenAI says it doesn't share individual conversations with businesses, including agent chats; the Hub shows aggregate numbers like mentions, profile views and referral clicks once activity passes a privacy threshold. Businesses can also sponsor their agent as a destination for ChatGPT Ads, with labelled placements, and the reporting says claiming a profile doesn't buy better treatment in ChatGPT's normal answers. Reports describe it as free during the beta, with paid tiers not ruled out.

I don't want to argue about whether this is good or bad for the web. What I keep turning over is a smaller, practical question: what changes for a small team when the first conversation about your product might happen somewhere you don't control?

A few things I keep coming back to.

Your landing page stops being your first impression. If someone has already read ChatGPT's summary of you and asked your agent three questions, they arrive at your site with a formed opinion. The page has to confirm something, not introduce it.

The agent's limits become your brand. A human support person can say "I'm not sure, let me check." An agent built from a knowledge base will answer whatever it's asked unless you deliberately tell it not to. What you forbid it to say is probably more important than what you teach it.

You lose the transcript. That's the right call for users' privacy, and I'd want it that way as a user. But it means the single best source of product feedback, the exact words people use when they're confused, goes into a dashboard of topics instead of your inbox.

For Murror this is harder than for most. People come to us to understand how they feel, and an honest answer to "will this help me?" is "maybe, and here's what it isn't." I'd want an agent that's happy to say "this isn't the right tool for that" and point somewhere better. I'm not sure a sales-shaped surface rewards that, and I'd rather not ship an agent than ship one that oversells.

So, open questions, and I'd love people to answer each other, not just me:

Would you claim your profile and build an agent, or wait and see? Why?

If you did build one, what's the one thing you'd never let it say on your behalf?

And for anyone who already runs a support bot on their own site: what did you learn about where it should hand over to a human?