Yellow Pages in the chat window: how ChatGPT, Reddit and Tencent sell AI answers

What this is about

If you needed a plumber in the old days, you opened the Yellow Pages. Then came Google, and with it “Google My Business” profiles: businesses claim their listing, keep their opening hours up to date and see how often people find them. The same kind of system is now being built into chatbots, by several companies at once.

On November 10, 2026, OpenAI launched Businesses in ChatGPT. The same day, Reddit announced Reddit Reviews, AI product pages with a buy button. A day later, Tencent launched Yuanbao search, which also carries ads. Also on November 10, OpenAI bought the travel agent Odessia. A few weeks earlier, OpenAI had announced ads that appear while images are being generated.

Our take: the answer in the chat window is becoming a storefront for merchants. Every provider insists that money doesn't affect the actual recommendation. Yet independent measurements show those recommendations come out differently with almost every query anyway. So what exactly are businesses measuring and buying there?

OpenAI: business profile, analytics, your own agent

At the center is the free Business Hub, an admin page for businesses. According to hands-on reports from flaviocopes.com and PPC Land, signing up works like this. You search for your listing and prove that you're allowed to represent the business. You can do that by text or phone call to the business number, by company email, by DNS record (a verification string you add to your domain's settings) or through a Shopify store. The identity provider Persona then checks your ID. Only after that do you get the blue checkmark and access to data, product feeds with prices and inventory, and analytics.

The analytics show mentions, profile views, website clicks and the top five “Discovery Topics”, meaning the subjects of conversations the business came up in. You can view 7 or 28 days. The definitions are narrow. For online businesses, a mention only counts when ChatGPT links to the website. According to flaviocopes, just naming the brand doesn't count. For local businesses, a result for the location counts as soon as it's displayed, even if nobody opens it. OpenAI's own note says a click doesn't mean a confirmed visit or a purchase. Businesses can't see individual chats or prompts, and an OpenAI spokesperson told Digiday that the beta doesn't show share of voice compared to competitors.

The second piece is Business Agents: a separately labeled chat in which a business answers customer questions. For now, they're open only to online retailers and online service providers in the US. OpenAI builds and runs the agent itself, using the business's instructions and product data. Benji Shomair, who runs monetization at OpenAI, told Digiday: “We don't allow businesses to bring their own agents.” The rules are strict. The agent has to identify itself as AI, can't invent prices or reviews, can't create false urgency and can't keep pushing after a no. It isn't allowed to ask for health data, ID documents or bank details. For now, checkout happens on the brand's website. According to The Next Web, a payment system with Visa is in the works.

This is where the money comes in. OpenAI sells the same agents as Sponsored Agents, meaning they're the destination of paid ChatGPT ads. That's been in testing with selected US advertisers since September. Shomair calls the Business Agent “the organic experience” and the Sponsored Agent “the paid one”, with the agent behind both meant to be “the same”. The Russian site Habr sees this as a “classic monopoly funnel”. Businesses hand their data to OpenAI, customer traffic stays inside the chat, and startups that built AI shopping advisors for online retailers lose their business.

Ads in the chat and next to the image

According to The Next Web, ChatGPT advertising passed a billion dollars in annualized revenue in August and has signed up more than 100,000 advertisers. Until now, ads ran below the answers. On October 5, OpenAI announced a new format being tested in the US: image ads that appear while ChatGPT is generating an image. According to Dataconomy, some users on the Free and Go plans now see the message “Here's an ad while we create your image”. The ad disappears once the image is ready. OpenAI promises the ads are “clearly labeled and stay separate from the image being created”. One early report doesn't quite fit the picture of precisely targeted ads, though. Juozas Kaziukėnas of Marketplace Pulse saw a pet food ad in a conversation that had nothing to do with animals.

Reddit and Tencent: two different models

Reddit Reviews condenses user threads about around 10,000 products into AI summaries. Each page has praise and criticism, comparisons with similar products, links to the original discussions and a “Buy it now” button. Prices, images and purchase links come from brand and retailer catalogs. Reddit says businesses can't pay for placement and that it doesn't take a commission. According to The Next Web, it's unclear how the pages will make money and whether ads will run there in future. PPC Land reports that some products in the shopping carousels Reddit has been testing in search since February come from advertisers' catalogs. So they aren't purely organic, and it's unclear how that's labeled. The bigger risk lies elsewhere, though. According to The Verge and 404 Media, agencies deliberately plant posts in Reddit threads to influence AI models. Banning paid placement doesn't stop anyone from manipulating the discussions the summaries are built from.

Tencent keeps ads physically separate in Yuanbao search. Ads sit in their own module labeled “相关广告” (related ads), and clicking “收起广告” (hide ads) collapses the whole block. According to Sina, product lead Li Ruichang said:

“We're not against advertising, but users shouldn't have to look for their answers in the ads.”

That matches China's internet advertising rules, in force since May 2023. They require paid rankings to be clearly marked as “广告” (advertisement), and the same goes for reviews and testimonials with a purchase link. The Chinese reports don't say whether ads can influence the AI answer itself.

The rules compared

What businesses are actually measuring

In January, Rand Fishkin (SparkToro) and Patrick O'Donnell (Gumshoe.ai) published a study. Around 600 volunteers asked ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI twelve recommendation questions, each one 60 to 100 times, for a total of 2,961 runs. The result: the chance of getting the same list of brands twice was under 1 in 100. The same list in the same order came up in fewer than 1 in 1,000 cases. On top of that, people phrase the same intent in wildly different ways. 142 self-written headphone prompts had an average semantic similarity of 0.081, where 1 means identical. Fishkin says any tool that reports an “AI ranking position” is “full of baloney”. Something else was stable, though: Bose, Sony, Sennheiser and Apple showed up in 55 to 77 percent of answers. So visibility can be measured as a frequency across many runs. One caveat: Gumshoe sells this kind of measurement tool itself, and the study isn't peer-reviewed.

Our take: that's exactly why OpenAI's analytics cut both ways. They count real mentions in real conversations. That's more than third-party tools like Peec AI or Semrush can estimate from samples. Farhad Divecha of the agency Accuracast told Digiday that if those tools' numbers turn out to be “wildly off”, the agency will rethink them. What the number in the Hub doesn't answer is why. If the selection gets reshuffled with every query, a mentions chart is more of a weather report than a ranking. And because a brand name mentioned on its own doesn't count, it may even undercount brands. Shomair says a profile shouldn't have “any impact on how often” a business appears. In the same breath, he says well-maintained data could help show it in “more relevant” conversations. Neither claim has been backed up.

What already applies in Germany

• Text ads: According to the agency haimle, they've been running in Germany and 30 other European markets since August 24, 2026, on the Free and Go plans only. haimle quotes OpenAI's Help Center: “Personalized ads are initially not available in the EEA and Switzerland.” Ads are selected based on the current conversation, not past chats. According to Notebookcheck, data protection authorities in Hamburg and Berlin advise users not to opt in to personalization later on.
• Business Hub: It opens in German. When haimle tried to claim a profile on November 11, it ended up on a waitlist with no date. Agents, product feeds and shopping in ChatGPT are US-only.
• Legal framework: On August 31, 2026, the European Commission designated ChatGPT's search feature a “very large online search engine” under the Digital Services Act, based on around 159 million monthly users in the EU. Among other things, OpenAI now has to keep a public ad repository. Germany's Act Against Unfair Competition (UWG) also explicitly bans search results that don't disclose paid placements (Annex No. 11a). As far as we could find, no court has yet ruled on whether a chatbot recommendation counts as a “search result” in that sense. We also found no statement on the issue from the Federation of German Consumer Organisations (vzbv).

There's already a gray area today. A DataPulse analysis of around 6,700 product questions found that 28 percent of the sources ChatGPT cites in German answers lead to pages with an advertising or affiliate disclosure, meaning pages that earn a cut of sales made through their links. For Perplexity, the figure is 31.6 percent. The disclosure is on the original page, but it gets lost in the AI answer.

The bigger picture

The Odessia acquisition shows where things are heading. The agent holds IATA accreditation (the airline industry's license to issue tickets) and could book trips on its own. According to Investing.com, on the day of the deal Expedia fell as much as 5 percent at one point, Booking up to 3 percent and Airbnb around 3.5 percent. The industries that have made their money as intermediaries see themselves under threat.

Our verdict: the “Google My Business” for chatbots has arrived. In Germany, though, only bits of it have shown up so far. If you're a merchant, it's worth claiming your profile and keeping your data clean, since it costs nothing. Just don't read rankings and mentions charts like stock prices. For users, the separation between answer and ad is currently nothing more than a promise from the providers, and nobody outside can verify it. Things get tricky when paid and “organic” agents look identical and differ only by a small label. The EU ad repository under the DSA will be the first place where you can at least trace who is paying for what in ChatGPT.