While this is clearly a stepping stone for them to sell us ads, you should do this right now because:
- It's free
- You can tell ChatGPT what to say about your brand (who knows if it will listen)
- They'll tell you how often your brand shows up on ChatGPT
The last one is the important one. The new Business Hub is the first place we're seeing actual citation data from one of the foundation models. After looking at first-party data on mentions, clicks, and discovery topics for a bunch of brands, here are my takeaways:
- We get even less AI traffic than we thought. The average clickthrough rate is ~1.5% when your brand's website is listed in the answer.
- ChatGPT's offering is targeted at US e-commerce businesses. If you run one of those, I’d run a small ad test.
- This is just to sell ads... probably. OpenAI can’t sell you ads without showing you some numbers. That said, they could go further and give us a real AEO toolkit for free, which would undercut the AI tracking startups (Profound alone is valued at $1.8 billion). Google has spent the last year fighting the tools that scrape its rankings. Maybe OpenAI is skipping that fight by owning the data from day one?
Your homework is to go claim your business. It’s free and it takes 5 minutes. If you want help analyzing your mentions dashboard, send me a screenshot. | 
