ChatGPT is about to show brands how often it mentions them. OpenAI is testing an analytics dashboard that counts how often a business shows up in ChatGPT’s answers and how many clicks those appearances send to its website, according to Digiday. The ChatGPT mention count tool sits inside a wider Business Hub that has not launched yet, and it would give businesses the first read on their visibility that comes from OpenAI itself.
The tool was spotted by Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of the e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse, who posted a screenshot on LinkedIn last week, on 6 November. The banner in the screenshot asks businesses to “Claim your business in ChatGPT”, according to two separate sources with knowledge of how it works who spoke to Digiday. Once claimed, a business can track its mentions and keep its products and business information current.
Claiming a business also unlocks what OpenAI calls a business agent, which answers customer questions using the contact details the business supplies. Getting in requires proof of authority to represent the business. Kaziukenas said he first saw traces of the ChatGPT mention count feature in August, and the screenshot he shared is labelled as unreleased and in beta.
The ChatGPT mention count feature would land in a market that has grown up around a gap in OpenAI’s own tools. Brands have spent two years paying outside vendors to estimate how often ChatGPT names them, because the chatbot gives no report of its own. A dashboard built by OpenAI would change that, since it would count appearances from the company’s own logs rather than from sample prompts run by a third party. The ChatGPT mention count would be the first such number to come from inside the system.
ChatGPT mention count and what the dashboard shows
According to Kaziukenas, the dashboard logs impressions and clicks each day and plots them on a chart. An impression means the business appeared in a ChatGPT response, and a click means someone followed a link to its website. The counts are per brand, not per product, as Kaziukenas confirmed in reply to a reader who asked. The tool deals in organic answers, and on paper it sits apart from ChatGPT ads.
What the dashboard does not show is just as important. The prompts stay hidden, and so does user data, and there is no ranking against competitors. A brand would watch its ChatGPT mention count go up or down with nothing inside the tool to explain the change. The prompt is the part marketers would most want to act on, and OpenAI is keeping it to itself for now.
ChatGPT mention count and the vendors it replaces
Generative engine optimisation vendors such as Profound and AdthenaHQ already sell brands a read on their ChatGPT visibility, mostly by running prompts through the chatbot at scale and tracking what comes back. None of them has OpenAI’s own counts, though the beta dashboard also omits the prompts and competitor rankings those vendors sell. OpenAI’s figures should be more accurate, because it holds the real logs, but far less detailed than the outside tools. The ChatGPT mention count is the piece those vendors cannot offer, because only OpenAI holds the logs that would make it exact.
The context is a fast growing advertising business. Digiday reported on 5 November, citing Adthena data, that 1,082 distinct brands advertised on ChatGPT in June, 3,741 in July and 6,333 in August across the US, Australia, the UK and the EU, with September expected to reach around 6,830. OpenAI said on 21 October that more than 100,000 advertisers had run campaigns since launch, and that availability was expanding to 89 countries. The company also said on 31 August that ChatGPT Ads had reached a 1 billion dollar annualised revenue run rate in less than 200 days.
OpenAI declined to comment for the Digiday story, and there is no confirmed launch date, price or country rollout for the Business Hub. The ChatGPT mention count tool remains in testing, and businesses will have to wait to see whether it arrives, and what it leaves out when it does.