ChatGPT can build a sales agent from your website
Two SEOs posted first looks at the new business tools, and the setup is mostly automatic.
ChatGPT's new business tools include an agent builder, a setup that creates a chat assistant to recommend your products or services to customers. It reads your website and fills in its own suggestions for what to recommend.
Lily Ray posted a first look and called it "pretty cool". She said it pulls a lot of recommendations out of your website, so it takes little effort to get running. She also said she would still customize and optimize it as needed, rather than leave the defaults in place.
it pulls a lot of recommendations out of your website so it’s pretty low-effort to get it set up
What the rest of the toolset looks like
Aleyda Solis also posted a first look and was less impressed. She said SEOs expected a search console, meaning a reporting tool that shows how you perform, and instead got a basic business profile for local businesses blended with a basic merchant center for ecommerce, plus the agent builder. A merchant center is where a shop uploads its product details. Her verdict was that OpenAI currently gets more out of businesses than businesses get out of it.
This follows the earlier rollout of the ChatGPT business hub, where companies can see how often ChatGPT mentions them.
What this means for you
If you sell something online or serve local customers, this is the first time you get to shape how ChatGPT talks about your business, instead of hoping it reads your site correctly. The low effort part cuts both ways. A tool that writes its own recommendations from your pages will only be as good as those pages. If your site is thin on detail about what you actually sell, who you serve and what makes you different, the agent will guess from thin material.
Only two SEOs have shared hands-on looks so far, so treat this as early. Nobody has reported results from running an agent with real customers yet.
If you want to try it, go into ChatGPT's business tools, let the agent builder read your site, then read every suggestion it generates before you turn it on. Fix anything it got wrong about your pricing, your service area or your product range. If you would not say it to a customer on the phone, do not let the agent say it either.
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