ChatGPT is building a reporting tool that would show businesses how often they appear in its answers and how many people click through to their websites, according to Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of the e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse, who described the feature in a LinkedIn post today. OpenAI has not announced it. Kaziukėnas said the work had been visible in early form since August, and that a banner which appeared today suggested a launch was getting close.

Barry Schwartz, who reported the post for Search Engine Roundtable today, described the project as a tool in the mould of Google's Search Console or Bing's Webmaster Tools. The comparison has a history. On July 9, 2025, Glenn Gabe, the consultant behind G-Squared Interactive, published an essay titled "The Case for ASC," arguing that ChatGPT, Perplexity and other AI platforms should build an "AI Search Console, or ASC" for site owners. Sixteen months later, the first sign of such a product at OpenAI covers a narrow slice of what Gabe asked for.

In Short

ChatGPT appears to be building a dashboard where a business can see how many times ChatGPT mentioned it each day and how many people clicked through to its website. That matters to brands and marketers who have been paying outside tools to estimate those numbers, because OpenAI has never given ordinary businesses this data for unpaid answers. The catch is that the dashboard reportedly will not show which questions led to each mention, so a business would see the score but not the reasons behind it.

What Kaziukėnas described

The feature sits behind a banner inviting businesses to claim their business in ChatGPT. According to Search Engine Roundtable, the banner lists three functions. One tracks how often a business is mentioned in ChatGPT conversations. A second lets a business add its latest products and keep its details current. A third lets a business's own agent answer customer questions using context the business controls.

The measurement part is simple. According to Kaziukėnas, as reported by Search Engine Roundtable, the tool records two events: impressions, defined as the number of times a business appeared in ChatGPT responses, and clicks on links to the business's website. Both are counted daily and displayed as a chart. Kaziukėnas placed the analytics inside a larger feature called Business Hub, open only to businesses that have verified ownership, for example by connecting a Shopify store.

Equally important is what the charts leave out. According to Kaziukėnas, the tool shows no prompt data, no user data and no competitive benchmark or ranking. In that assessment, the charts cannot explain why mentions or clicks rise or fall. Combined with external tools that track prompts, however, they would supply accurate first-party data on whether GEO and AEO strategies are working. Schwartz added that the feature appears separate from ChatGPT's advertising business and aimed at organic answers.

All of this rests on one person's view of an interface that has not launched. Search Engine Roundtable's report carries no comment from OpenAI, and the company has not described Business Hub publicly. Kaziukėnas has flagged unannounced commerce moves before: in May, the entrepreneur shared an Amazon job listing for an agentic commerce team and noted seeing no other mentions of such teams at Amazon. The naming also invites confusion. ChatGPT Business is already the name of OpenAI's workplace subscription, which is a different product from a hub for businesses that appear in answers.

What would count as an impression?

The definitions matter more than the chart. Kaziukėnas's description counts appearances of a business in responses. Gabe's 2025 essay defined the metric differently, as "Impressions in AI answers based on a site's content being referenced or quoted." Those are not the same event. A retailer can be named in an answer without any of its pages serving as a source, while a publisher's article can be cited in an answer that is about somebody else's product. Whether the ChatGPT tool counts text mentions, product cards, citations or sidebar links has not been described.

Counting rules also move the numbers. Vincent Terrasi wrote in Search Engine Journal on December 8, 2025 about a confidential OpenAI report of the kind made available to a small group of publishers. According to that account, the top URL for one large publisher logged 185,000 distinct conversation impressions and 3,800 clicks in a month, a click-through rate of 2%. Counting repeat appearances within conversations, the same URL had 518,000 impressions and 4,400 clicks, a rate Terrasi gave as 0.80%, although 4,400 divided by 518,000 comes to about 0.85% by PPC Land's calculation. Same page, same month - and the rate depends on whether repeats count. That report also suggests OpenAI has measured impressions and clicks for selected partners since at least late 2025; the novelty in Business Hub would be access for businesses that are not publishing partners.

A count of mentions also sits downstream of decisions users never see. Research by Suganthan Mohanadasan, covered by PPC Land in August, found that only 3.1% of 3,554 pages ChatGPT retrieved earned a citation, across 60 conversations on a single account. Brands that ChatGPT itself named in its internal search queries reached the final answer 68.9% of the time, against 2.1% for brands whose pages were fetched but never named in those queries. Even prompt data, had it been included, would not show those machine-written queries.

A wishlist from July 2025

Gabe's essay started from a modest base. "It's still a tiny piece of traffic for most sites (less than 1%), but again, it's growing," Gabe wrote of AI search. Third-party tools for tracking visibility were "popping up left and right," but "they won't capture everything, they can be expensive, etc." The core complaint was structural: "And unlike Google and Bing, there is no reporting from the AI tools themselves." The conclusion did not hedge. "We desperately need that for AI Search tools, and yesterday."

The essay then listed twelve features. PPC Land compared them with what Kaziukėnas described today. Absence from a description of an unreleased product does not prove absence from the product, so the third column records only what has been reported.

Feature in Gabe's essay Reported ChatGPT tool
Prompts a site shows up for, with a flag for initial or follow-up prompts Excluded, according to Kaziukėnas
Impressions in AI answers Described (appearances in responses)
Clicks and engagement Clicks described; engagement not described
Trending over time Described (daily chart)
Filtering prompts and landing pages, including regex Not described
Reporting by device and country Not described
Index coverage for platforms building their own indexes Not described
User feedback trends (thumbs up or down) Not described; user data excluded
Flagged content, "a manual actions viewer for AI Search" Not described
Crawl stats, including response codes Not described
Removal tool by URL or path Not described
API access for bulk export Not described

Three of twelve, by PPC Land's count

On this reading, the reported tool meets three of Gabe's twelve requests: impressions, clicks and a trend line. One, prompt data, is explicitly missing. The other eight have not been mentioned. Gabe called an API essential for "building advanced reporting tools by companies, agencies, and consultants." G-Squared Interactive sells SEO and AI search consulting, work that such an API would feed. Still, the gap is wide.

The essay also argued that reporting would help the platforms. "That transparency via the reporting could also yield more site owners opening up crawling to AI search tools as they see visibility, traffic, and the value of ranking there," Gabe wrote. Crawling is where the reported tool says least. OpenAI revised its crawler documentation in December 2025, stating that robots.txt rules may not apply to ChatGPT-User because its requests are initiated by users. A BuzzStream study covered by PPC Land in April found that 82.4% of the top 50 news sites blocking OAI-SearchBot still appeared in citations. For publishers weighing access, crawl data would answer a sharper question than a mention count.

Google and Bing moved first, partly

When Gabe wrote, Google already counted one AI surface. AI Mode clicks and impressions had joined Search Console totals on June 17, 2025, merged into web search figures rather than broken out. Google then announced dedicated generative AI reports on June 3, 2026, covering AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative features in Discover. When the reports reached every site on August 31, 2026, they offered impressions by page, country, device and date - and no clicks or queries. Google also gave site owners a control to exclude their sites from AI Overviews and AI Mode, working at domain level, with page-level control scheduled for March 3, 2027. It resembles the removal tool Gabe requested, although it excludes whole domains rather than individual URLs or paths.

Microsoft went further on queries. Bing opened a public preview of AI Performance in Webmaster Tools on February 10, 2026, covering Copilot, AI summaries in Bing and select partner integrations. Its four launch metrics - total citations, average cited pages per day, grounding queries and page-level citation activity - measure how often content is used as a source. Grounding queries are a sample of overall activity. On March 23, 2026, Bing mapped grounding queries to the pages they cite, and in October it added a Topics Portfolio beta showing queries where other sites are cited. That is the competitive view Kaziukėnas says the ChatGPT tool lacks.

Three platforms, three partial answers. Which one shows clicks, queries and impressions together? None, so far. Google reports AI impressions without AI clicks or queries. Bing reports citations and sampled queries. ChatGPT, if the tool launches as described, would report mentions and clicks without prompts. None has shipped the full set Gabe listed.

Why the clicks matter, and where they stop

Scale explains the interest. OpenAI's Adam Fry has said that ChatGPT's volume of search-like queries is roughly one-fifth of Google's, and that ChatGPT grew from one billion to 1.2 billion users over two months. Traffic tells a smaller story. Ahrefs research across 76,000 websites, published in February 2026, put ChatGPT at 0.21% of site traffic against nearly 40% for Google. In an analysis published in December 2025, Microsoft Clarity put AI referrals at less than 1% of visitors across more than 1,200 publisher and news sites, though that traffic had grown 155% in eight months and converted to sign-ups at 1.66%, against 0.15% for organic search.

A click count inside ChatGPT measures only part of that effect. Similarweb data reported in June 2026 found that brands ChatGPT recommended were 2.5 times more likely to receive a visit within seven days, and that 55.9% of AI-influenced visits arrived through search rather than directly from the assistant. A user who reads about a brand in ChatGPT and then searches for it on Google would not register as a ChatGPT click. Standard analytics credit that later visit to search, so AI referral traffic figures capture only the direct portion. A first-party click count from OpenAI would firm up that portion without settling the rest.

The third-party market Gabe described in 2025 remains small and exposed to platform decisions. The IAB said in August that only 16% of brands systematically track AI visibility, and its framework treats programs with fewer than 50 queries as exploratory. Semrush is dropping Copilot from its tracking on November 9, citing changes to Microsoft's access requirements, which cuts the number of platforms it tracks from nine to eight. Tools that simulate prompts depend on platforms tolerating them. First-party counts do not, which is the strength Kaziukėnas pointed to. In that account, the prompt-tracking tools would still be needed alongside them to explain the numbers.

The paid side already has numbers

OpenAI's advertisers have had reporting for most of this year. ChatGPT ads opened as a pilot on February 9, 2026, and OpenAI said on August 31 that they had passed $1 billion in annualised revenue run rate. By September, OpenAI's Ads Manager offered click attribution windows of 7, 14 or 30 days and view windows of zero or one day, and a Shopify app for running ChatGPT ads had been released on September 3, 2026. A business paying for placement gets campaign reporting. Outside a small group of publishing partners, a business appearing in an unpaid answer has had no data from OpenAI at all.

Shopify runs through both sides. OpenAI launched Instant Checkout on September 29, 2025, starting with US Etsy sellers and with plans for more than one million Shopify merchants through the Agentic Commerce Protocol. Ownership verification through a connected Shopify store, as Kaziukėnas described it, would follow the same route: OpenAI has reached merchants through commerce platforms rather than through their websites. Whether a publisher or a service business without a store could verify has not been reported.

The banner's reference to a business agent raises a further question. OpenAI began testing Sponsored Agents with select US advertisers on September 16, 2026. Whether the organic agent in Business Hub is related to that paid format has not been established.

Reactions on LinkedIn

Schwartz's own reply in the thread asked Kaziukėnas for more screenshots. Others weighed what the data would add. Luigi F., a digital marketing leader working across search, media, strategy and commerce, wrote: "I wonder how much this data will vary from what's already available in Microsoft Webmaster tools since CoPilot says it pulls data from its partners."

Hai Mag, chair and chief executive of Eva Commerce, was blunter. "ChatGPT shipping mention and click charts is the AEO scoreboard brands have been guessing at," Mag wrote. "Daily impressions beat another vanity SEO report." Another reply in the thread made the counterpoint: ChatGPT is one surface among several, with buyers also asking Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, and first-party data shows what happened rather than why.

What is not established

Several basic facts remain open. OpenAI has not confirmed the tool, its name, a launch date or the markets where it would be available. Eligibility has been described only through one example, a connected Shopify store. The definition of an appearance, the treatment of repeat appearances in a conversation and the click attribution method are unknown. Nothing has been reported about exports, an API, pricing or how long data would be retained.

Near its close, Gabe's essay made a prediction. "Without a search console-like product, site owners will continue to fly blind," it read in July 2025. If Business Hub ships as Kaziukėnas described it, some businesses would get a first look at their standing inside ChatGPT. Most of the instruments Gabe asked for would still be missing.

Timeline

Summary

Who: OpenAI, whose ChatGPT is building the reporting feature; Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, who described it; Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable, who reported it; and Glenn Gabe of G-Squared Interactive, whose July 2025 essay set out what an AI Search Console should contain. Businesses that verify ownership in ChatGPT, for example through Shopify, would be the users.

What: An analytics view inside a ChatGPT Business Hub that counts daily impressions, meaning appearances of a business in ChatGPT responses, and clicks to the business's website. According to Kaziukėnas, it shows no prompt data, no user data and no competitive benchmark. Measured against Gabe's twelve requested features, the reported tool covers three, by PPC Land's count. OpenAI has not announced it.

When: Kaziukėnas posted today, November 6, 2026, saying the feature had been visible in early form since August and that a banner seen today suggested a launch was near. Gabe's essay was published on July 9, 2025.

Where: Inside ChatGPT, for businesses that verify ownership. Markets and eligibility beyond the Shopify example have not been described.

Why: ChatGPT handles a volume of search-like queries that OpenAI puts at roughly one-fifth of Google's, yet most businesses have had no first-party data from OpenAI on how they appear in unpaid answers, while Google and Bing each offer partial AI reporting. Mention and click counts would give marketers a direct measure of results in ChatGPT, but without prompts they would not explain why visibility changes.