How Tour Operators Can Claim a ChatGPT Business Profile

Jarod LaFalce

Co-Founder / COO of BookingTerminal

Published on: November 13, 2026 | Estimated Read Time: 7 minutes

Introduction

More and more travelers are planning their trips by asking ChatGPT. Ask it for a family-friendly kayak tour or the best sunset cruise in town, and it answers with real businesses, pulled from websites, review sites and travel marketplaces.

On November 10, OpenAI gave businesses a way to claim a profile inside ChatGPT. Once you're verified, you can manage the details ChatGPT shows about your business, add your logo and photos, and see how often you come up in answers. If you've already set up your Google Business Profile, a lot of this will feel familiar.

The feature is in beta, and access for businesses with a physical location is still rolling out. However, it's free, and operators who understand it now will be ready when it opens up. This guide covers who can claim a profile today, how to claim one, and how to make it count.

What a ChatGPT Business Profile Gives You

A claimed profile helps make sure ChatGPT has accurate information about your business. Once you're verified, you can:

• Edit your business details, including your description, category, contact info, hours and website
• Add a logo and a cover photo
• Get a blue check on your profile, which shows travelers the business has claimed it
• See Insights, which show how often ChatGPT mentions you, how many people click through to your website, and the topics you come up in

For a tour operator, the website link is the piece that matters most. When guests can see your tours and book from the page it opens, your profile becomes one more path from ChatGPT to a booking on your own site.

Two things to know going in. OpenAI says claiming a profile doesn't change how often ChatGPT recommends a business, so the value is in making sure your details are right when you do come up. And there's no booking button on the profile itself. Guests book through the link to your site.

Can Your Tour Business Claim One Yet?

It depends on whether ChatGPT already has a listing for you.

If ChatGPT already shows your business as a place, you can search for it in Business Hub and claim it. For businesses with a physical location, that currently works only for existing listings in the U.S.

If there's no listing, you'll start a new profile, and the first question is how customers interact with your business: at a physical location or through a website. Choose physical location and, for now, you'll be added to a waitlist and emailed when you can continue.

Choose the option that matches where your experience actually happens. If guests meet you at a dock, a rental shop or a meeting point, that's a physical location.

For now, that means most tour operators will land on the waitlist. If you do, join it and use the time to get your tour information in shape. The last section of this guide covers what to work on.

How to Claim Your Profile, Step by Step

Here's what the process looks like, based on OpenAI's setup guide and our own claim.

1. Open Business Hub. Sign in to ChatGPT and open Business Hub from the sidebar.
2. Find your business. Search for it by name. If it's there, select it and confirm which ChatGPT account will manage it. If it isn't, start a new profile and choose how customers reach you.
3. Prove you control the business. OpenAI offers a few ways to verify, depending on the listing: a code by text or automated call to the business phone number, a code to the email on the listing, a record added to your website's domain, or a Shopify connection. Not every option appears for every business.
4. Pass the identity check. OpenAI uses Persona to confirm the person managing the profile is authorized to represent the business. Expect to scan a photo ID, do a quick face scan and enter your business details, which should match your official business records.
5. Wait for approval. OpenAI reviews each claim before it goes live and doesn't publish a review time. For a new profile, approval publishes it right away, so get your details right before you submit. Ours was approved the same day.

What to Put in Your Profile

Once you're verified, fill in your profile the way a guest would want to read it.

• Website link. Use the same website address you use on your other profiles, and make sure guests can find your tours and a Book Now button as soon as they land.
• Description. Say what you run, where, and who it's for. "Two-hour guided kayak tours on the Chattahoochee for families and first-timers" gives ChatGPT and travelers far more to work with than a tagline.
• Address and hours. Use the place guests actually check in and the hours you actually run, including seasonal changes.
• Logo and cover photo. Use a cover photo of the experience itself. It's the first thing a traveler sees when they open your profile.
• Contact details. Use a phone number and email someone checks during the season.

OpenAI reviews edits before they go live, and ChatGPT can still draw on other sources about your business. Give changes some time to show up in answers.

What Insights Shows You

Insights shows how often your business comes up in ChatGPT. You can switch between the last 7 and 28 days, and in our case the history went back weeks before we claimed, so we had a baseline right away.

Each view tracks three things:

• Mentions. How often your business shows up in ChatGPT's answers, whether or not anyone clicks.
• Website clicks. How many people clicked through to your site from ChatGPT.
• Top discovery topics. The kinds of conversations you come up in. It's a quick way to check whether ChatGPT understands what you actually sell.

Expect a big gap between mentions and clicks. Plenty of travelers will see your name in an answer and move on, so treat mentions as visibility and clicks as interest. If your booking reports show where bookings come from, add ChatGPT to the sources you collect data on.

A Quick Note on Business Agents

Business Hub also lets some businesses set up a Business Agent. It's a chat assistant OpenAI builds from information and instructions you provide, and travelers can open it from your profile to ask questions.

For now, agents are open to eligible U.S. ecommerce and online service businesses, with more business types to follow. They answer questions and link to your site, but they can't take bookings.

If agents open up to tour operators, setup has a few parts: a short tagline, a handful of suggested questions, instructions for how the agent should behave, and the business information it answers from. The best source material is the questions guests already ask you by email and phone, like what's included, age limits, what to bring, where to meet, and what happens if it rains or plans change. Write the answers the way you'd want them said, tell the agent to point guests to your contact details for anything about an existing booking or a refund, and have it send people to your website when they're ready to book. Then test it with real guest questions before you publish.

How to Get More Out of Your Profile

Your profile is one of several places ChatGPT looks. It also draws on the wider web, review sites and travel marketplaces, so the details you keep elsewhere help your profile do its job.

• Make your website the clearest source. Your website is one of the main sources AI tools draw on when they recommend local businesses. Put the details travelers ask about on your tour pages, like duration, price, meeting point, what's included, age limits and your cancellation policy. We cover more of this in our guide to getting found in AI-powered search.
• Keep reviews coming in. Reviews on sites like Yelp and Tripadvisor are part of what AI tools draw on when they recommend local businesses. If you don't have a routine for asking guests, set up a review workflow.
• Keep your details up to date. AI answers can pull from any page or listing that mentions your business, including old ones. When your prices, schedule or policies change, update them on your website and your other profiles at the same time.
• Make sure search engines can find your site. ChatGPT pulls from regular search results when it looks things up, so confirm your site shows up in both Google and Bing.

Conclusion

A ChatGPT business profile is free, and claiming one gives you a verified presence where increasingly more travelers are starting their plans, plus a first look at how often ChatGPT brings your business up. If you can claim yours now, do it. If you're on the waitlist, use the time to tighten your tour pages, reviews and listings, since that work pays off on every platform where guests find you.

When a traveler does click through, the page they land on has to make booking easy. BookingTerminal gives tour and activity operators online booking, payments, digital waivers, and more in one place, with white-glove setup and a dedicated support manager.