Someone in Dubai opens ChatGPT and asks where to buy a particular product, or which supplier to call. Your business might be in the answer. Until recently you had no way to see what was said about you, correct it, or find out whether any of it sent a single visitor to your website.
That is the gap Business Hub fills. It is worth being clear about what it is not, because the early coverage has muddled this: it is not advertising, and it is not a lever that pushes you up the answers. It is a record about your business that you are allowed to edit, once you have proved the business is yours.
What you get out of it
Three things, in practice.
- You get to own the file. Your website address, how you describe what you sell, your category, logo, delivery terms and returns terms all become yours to set rather than something assembled from whatever ChatGPT found lying around the web.
- You get numbers, though modest ones. A 28 day view of how often ChatGPT referred to you and how often someone clicked through to your site.
- You may get an agent. If you sell online in the United States, you get the option of a business agent, a small assistant customers can open and ask about your products and policies.
No advertising account is needed for any of it, and no enterprise contract either.
Where UAE businesses stand today
OpenAI has not published a country list. What it says is that whether you can claim or add a business comes down to where the business is, what kind of business it is, and whether the verification it would need is supported there. Vague, deliberately, because the rollout is still moving.
So the honest answer for a UAE company is: sign in, look, and see what the screen offers you. An online business may find the door open. A restaurant on Jumeirah Beach Road will not, for now. Either way, the groundwork further down this page is worth doing, because none of it is wasted when access does arrive.
Finding and claiming the listing
- Log in, and find Business Hub down the side of the screen.
- Search for the company by name.
- When the right one appears, select it and confirm which ChatGPT account will be running it from here.
- Pick one of the verification routes you are offered.
Three things can happen instead of that clean path.
- You were sent an invitation. Do not go looking through search. Open the link in that email and sign in with the exact address it was sent to. Forwarding it to a colleague does not work and is not how you share access later.
- The only option is to contact support. The listing has been locked. Use it and ask for access.
- Nothing matches at all. An eligible online business is sometimes offered the option of adding itself.
Proving the business is yours
You are shown whichever of these fit your business.
| Route | What it involves |
|---|---|
| Business phone | Pick a text message or an automated call, request the code and type it back in. |
| Business email | Same idea, to the address already tied to the business. |
| Website domain | ChatGPT gives you a TXT record to add to your DNS settings. Copy the type, the name and the value exactly as shown, then come back and run the check. |
| Shopify store | Connect the store, review what you are granting, and sign in to the store that belongs to the business you are claiming. |
Your claim then goes to OpenAI, which decides or asks for more and tells you by email. While it sits there, you can pull it back.
If you search and find your own business already claimed by someone else, open the profile and use the dispute option in the three dot menu. You will be asked to prove you are entitled to represent the company. Worth knowing: disputing a profile, or claiming one, changes nothing about how visible it is to customers in the meantime.
The second check, and the blue tick
An approved claim gets you in the door. It does not get you very far inside. Publishing any change, connecting product data, opening the insights, building an agent: all of it waits behind a second, heavier identity check run through a company called Persona.
This also settles a question people keep asking. The blue tick on a profile is not awarded for claiming. It turns up once Persona has cleared you, and not before.
Have ready a government issued ID, your registration paperwork and something showing you are authorised to act for the company. Whatever you type in should match those documents exactly. For a UAE business, that means pulling up the trade licence and copying the name and address from it rather than from memory or from your website footer. A mismatch here is the common reason these checks come back for a second round.
Keeping the information right
With both approvals through, the editable fields open up: website, description, category, logo, cover image, delivery policy, returns policy and a handful of optional extras. What you write has to sit inside OpenAI’s rules for businesses, and nothing goes live the moment you save it, since changes are reviewed first and then take their own time to filter into listings and answers.
Here is the part that gets overlooked. ChatGPT does not only read what you typed into Business Hub. It still draws on other sources when it talks about you. So if your hours say one thing on your website, another on your Google listing and a third here, you have not fixed the problem by filling in this one form. Fix them together or do not bother.
Retailers can also connect product data, either through Shopify or by uploading a CSV built to OpenAI’s specification, or by pointing at a hosted file. Prices and stock flow through that. It does not make ChatGPT recommend you, and it does not switch on an agent.
What the numbers actually tell you
Insights covers the last 28 days and stays at the aggregate level.
- Mentions are counted differently depending on what you are. For an online business it only counts when ChatGPT points at your website; saying your brand name in passing does not register. For a physical location it counts when your result is shown, whether or not anyone taps it.
- Website clicks are what they sound like.
- Discovery topics group the kinds of questions that led to you being mentioned or cited.
You never see the actual conversations. Not the prompts, not the chats with your own agent, nothing at the level of an individual customer. And an empty metric is not the same as a zero: it can simply mean too little data to report yet, so do not read a blank box as evidence that nobody found you.
Business agents, and why this section may not apply to you
An agent is a chat your customers can open to ask about what you sell and how you handle returns. Eligible United States ecommerce and online service companies with a website can build one, provided their industry is permitted under OpenAI’s rules for agents.
Building it means checking the information it will draw on, writing the instructions that shape its answers, then testing it the way a customer would. Ask it something awkward and ordinary, like whether a sale item can be returned, and see whether the answer is one you would stand behind. It stays private until you publish it.
Its limits are firm. It explains and it links to your site. It cannot take a payment, make a booking or look up an order. Shopify is not a requirement.
Five things claiming will not do
- It will not buy you better placement. OpenAI says plainly that recommendations stay independent, and that advertising does not sway them either.
- It will not bundle your locations together. Each brand is handled on its own, and claiming the parent does not sweep up the branches.
- It will not let you undo a published profile. Only unpublished drafts can be deleted, and support will not remove or hide a live one for you.
- It will not show you who asked what.
- It will not force an agent on you. Claiming, publishing an agent and advertising are three separate decisions, and most businesses will only ever want the first.
Decide who holds the keys before you start
Whoever claims the business becomes the admin, and from there can bring in colleagues or hand an agency the ability to manage the profile or the agent. Everyone uses their own ChatGPT login.
Give this ten minutes of thought rather than handing it to whoever happens to be free. It should be someone entitled to represent the company, on an account the company will still control after that person changes roles or leaves. We have all seen what happens when a business page sits on a former employee’s personal account.
What to have ready
None of this is required by OpenAI. It is simply what makes the difference between finishing in an afternoon and dragging it out across three weeks of rejected checks.
- The person who will claim it, and the account they will use.
- Trade licence, personal ID, and proof of authority, scanned and to hand.
- Name, address and registration details checked against the licence, not typed from memory.
- Access to your DNS, or a quick route to whoever has it.
- Description, category, logo, cover image, delivery and returns terms, written and agreed.
- The same details already corrected on your website and your other listings.
- For retailers, product data that is actually current on price and availability.
If you would rather not work out on your own how your business currently reads to ChatGPT and the other assistants, that is something our team looks at every week. We will tell you what is being said, where it is coming from, and which of it is worth fixing first.
Questions we are getting
We are a restaurant in Dubai. Can we claim our listing?
Not yet. Shops and restaurants with a physical location are currently limited to claiming listings that already exist in the United States.
Will this make ChatGPT recommend us more?
There is no promise of that anywhere, and you should treat anyone who tells you otherwise with suspicion. What claiming gives you is accuracy, which is worth having on its own. If ChatGPT is going to mention you, it may as well have the right website and the right returns policy.
Does the blue tick mean OpenAI vouches for us?
No. It records that the identity check behind the profile was approved. Nothing more is implied by it.
Can our agency handle all of this?
Yes, once an admin inside the business has claimed it and can grant that access. The claim itself has to start with someone authorised to represent the company.
We updated our details and ChatGPT still says the old thing. Why?
Two reasons, usually. Changes are reviewed before they go live and then take time to spread. And ChatGPT keeps reading other sources about you, so an answer may be repeating something it found elsewhere. That second one is a prompt to go and fix the other source.
Source
- OpenAI Help Center: Setting up your business on ChatGPT, checked 13 November 2026