ChatGPT has opened up its app platforms to all businesses. In general terms, that’s a Good Thing. Seriously. The question is whether this general good thing is specifically good for your and your business.

In this episode of the podcast, host Tim Peter looks at ChatGPT’s apps and addresses the following questions:

• Are ChatGPT apps good for your business or not?
• What are the risks of using ChatGPT apps for your business?
• How can you minimize those risks and get the long-term benefit for your business from ChatGPT apps?
• What are your immediate next steps if you’re interested in trying ChatGPT apps to reach customers?

All that and more in this episode of the show. Here are the show notes for you.

Should Your Business Have a ChatGPT App? (Episode 479) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links

• Developers can now submit apps to ChatGPT | OpenAI
• App submission guidelines
• Introducing apps in ChatGPT and the new Apps SDK | OpenAI
• The Biggest Risk to Your Business? Becoming a "Hidden Intermediary"
• How Intermediaries Drive Up Your Costs: 5 Ways to Protect Yourself (Travel Tuesday)
• The Brand is the Prompt (Thinks Out Loud 465)
• “Gatekeepers Gonna Gate” is Gonna Kill ChatGPT (Episode 477)
• What Changed in AI and Marketing This Year, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next (Episode 478)
• What ‘The Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business (Episode 474)
• In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing (Episode 472)
• Are ChatGPT’s Apps Good for Your Business? (Episode 471)
• AI and Zero-Click Search: The Real Story (Episode 467)

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Transcript: Should Your Business Have a ChatGPT App?

You probably saw the news right before the holidays that ChatGPT has opened up its apps to, well, essentially everyone. I think that this is a good news story generally and one that also illustrates where we’re likely to head long term. Because I’m really comfortable that we’ve all seen this movie before.

In my view, we’re definitely headed for another gatekeepers gonna gate reality. Why? Well, that’s what this episode is all about.

I’m going to look at ChatGPT apps, as well as the future landscape of apps in Gemini, Perplexity and Claude, and talk a bit about what those mean for your business today and longer term.

I’m Tim Peter. This is episode 470 of The Big Show. Let’s dive in.

So yeah, ChatGPT now lets developers submit apps to their platform. That is almost certainly a good news story. It’s certainly far more good news than bad. It’s very cool. It levels the playing field for most businesses. One of the biggest problems in my opinion of the launch of apps in ChatGPT was that it really favored large companies. It was limited to large companies. And it heavily skewed towards intermediaries like Zillow, OpenTable, Expedia, Booking.com, TripAdvisor, DoorDash, Instacart, and Spotify. Y’know, gatekeepers of some size or other.

But by opening apps up to the world — and of course with moderation to ensure that your app meets their various guidelines — now apps in ChatGPT aren’t just for Expedia and Booking and Zillow and the like any longer. There are some downsides, and I’m gonna come back to that shortly, and more importantly, what you can do about those downsides.

But overall, this is a really good thing. This is really, really beneficial and puts you, at least in theory, on an even playing field with some of the biggest players in many different verticals.

Another huge benefit is that it’s almost always great when potential gatekeepers are forced to compete with one another. You have more opportunity to show up and usually have lower cost to do so, at least in the short time, when there two or more big players in a space.

So having ChatGPT provide all these different apps puts a little bit of pressure on Google in some ways that could make your costs lower there in the near term.

When ChatGPT limited the apps to its partners, it automatically positioned them as gatekeepers. And that’s not great. Why? Well, say it with me now: Gatekeepers gonna gate.

One of the reasons that Google and Facebook and Amazon have gotten away with treating businesses and advertisers and sometimes computers like crap for so long is that there really isn’t another significant player in the areas they work in to keep them from treating people like crap.

Back in the dark ages of hospitality and commerce, the very early 2000s, Expedia was a bit of a bully to hotels in the United States because Expedia simply didn’t have a credible competitor to prevent that from happening. When Booking.com showed up in the US, though, suddenly Expedia became a much better partner and the overall ecosystem has been healthier for it over the long term.

And of course, both Booking and Expedia really became great partners once Google became a major player in the hospitality value chain. So “yay, competition!”

One final positive for apps existing is that they provide marketers and e-commerce folks and businesses overall a much better path to make sure that they show up on ChatGPT. There will be less uncertainty, less guesswork around how you can actually appear on ChatGPT. A lot less smoke and mirrors and I would assume a lot less BS around the kinds of, “you have to post on Reddit three times a day to show up” nonsense we’ve all seen far too often over the last year or two.

In short, apps on ChatGPT are a positive development overall, in my view.

Of course, every silver lining has a cloud, right? We’d be foolish to overlook the potential downsides here and what they mean for your business.

The biggest downside is that early adopters will probably get some quick wins, but longer term discovery is going to be a challenge for everyone.

Why? I’m glad you asked.

Let’s say that some tiny share of the 200 million actively maintained websites in the world, maybe 1-2%, deploy MCP servers to expose their content and data to apps in ChatGPT and to other AI agents or answer engines. For comparison’s sake, by the way, there’s roughly 2 million apps in Apple’s App Store and maybe 3 to 4 million in Google’s App Store. So, you know, 1-2%.

That two to four million apps matters. Remember when I said that ChatGPT is going to moderate the apps allowed into its app store? There is no universe where that moderation is anything other than automated. There will be far too many apps for human moderation to be the norm. That’s what Apple and Google do today. And I’m going to come back to that in just a second.

I think this is going to be true for pretty much all the AI answer engines, by the way. This isn’t just about apps and ChatGPT. Today there is a community maintained MCP Registry and some private MCP registries to find MCP servers so that, you know, various tools can find MCP your servers.

But what happens when the number of servers scales up to the single digit millions, if not the tens of millions? Human moderation starts to break once you get past a certain point.

Take Wikipedia, for example. Wikipedia has about 50 million articles. They are also the first to acknowledge that many of those 50 million articles are pretty low quality and they have almost 300,000 editors. Okay, in practice, there’s only a few thousand who are super active, but still it illustrates the problem.

You don’t want a whole bunch of low quality crap if you’re ChatGPT or if you’re Perplexity or if you’re Claude. You don’t want apps coming through that just aren’t going to be all that good. There is simply no way where ChatGPT or any other serious player lets that happen with apps on their platform. No way, no how, nuh-uh. I’m 100% confident on that one.

So how are apps or MCP servers going to get discovered? Well, the likely volume strongly implies that there’s going to have to be some sort of search engine, an MCP server search engine, an AI answer engine app search platform. And that implies another gatekeeping opportunity.

ChatGPT is going to become that by default for apps on its platforms. They have to, or the experience is gonna be total garbage and people won’t use ChatGPT. We just know that. I’m pretty confident the same is going to happen for any other AI platform that offers apps. And those that don’t offer apps create an opportunity for a new MCP search engine to fill that role.

In short, each of these scenarios creates a new opportunity where gatekeepers gonna gate.

Also, there’s a lot of money to be made here for those who step up. mean, ignore Google for a second. We know how much Google makes by finding the right answer to the question. And even if you only look at Apple’s App Store, Apple has noted in many press releases over the years that they have facilitated over $1.3 trillion for their App Store partners. While they don’t break out their App Store revenue, they don’t tell you exactly how much they make, their services revenue, of which the App Store is a big component, is somewhere over $100 billion per year. That’s not nothing. That’s a pretty big deal.

Being found in app stores is a reality unto itself too. There’s a whole category of app store optimization techniques that exist for Apple and Google’s app stores. If you’re not familiar with these, they’re like SEO, but for apps. If you want your ChatGPT app to be found, at some point, you’ll undoubtedly have to learn how to optimize for their algorithm once it exists.

Or you’ll have to pay them for visibility.

Or, and hear me out here, you’ll have to convince customers to search for your app by name.

Probably all of the above, if we’re being honest.

Does any of this sound familiar to you?

I don’t actually think I’m making a bold prediction. I think this reality is inevitable. Now, usually in the show, this is the part where I tell you why I could be wrong or what my confidence level is or how much would I bet on this specific thing coming to pass. And I fully recognize that when you have a hammer, sometimes everything looks like a nail. So sure, I suppose that I could be applying my thinking that I’ve done in other situations to a fundamentally different situation.

I just don’t think that’s likely in this case though. I feel pretty good about this one.

And the reason I feel pretty good is because this is a fundamental pattern of information products, just being applied in a brand new context. As I talked about in my book, Digital Reset, the world has gone through this same pattern again and again and again. Libraries and card catalogs, phone numbers and phone books, the internet and search engines, beings and social networks, mobile phones and app stores, and so on.

Once a sufficient volume of information exists, books, phone numbers, websites, human beings, apps, what have you, the problem isn’t that the information you want isn’t out there. The problem isn’t that the information you want doesn’t exist. Instead, the problem is finding the information you want and, of course, for businesses, for marketers, is being found among all the other choices that exist. That’s the actual problem.

ChatGPT apps and MCP servers are all simply sources of information. So the same pattern is going to apply. We’re obviously not there yet. mean, ChatGPT only announced this a couple of weeks ago. But at some point, and probably sooner rather than later, making sure that your app or MCP server gets found by whomever you want to find it is going to be your single biggest challenge of making these work for your business. Just like SEO or just like App Store optimization if you’re doing that.

Most commercial platforms tend to solve for this longer term problem, you know, by charging for preferred placement. Again, sound familiar? Gatekeepers gonna gate, man, that’s what they do. And they’re going to drive up your cost of being seen.

So the question I would be asking right now, the question I am asking right now, is what do we do about all of this? What should you do about all of this? Well, first, you probably should be thinking about whether a ChatGPT app makes sense for your business.

Spoiler, I’d argue that it does, not least because you’ll need an MCP server for a ChatGPT app or essentially any other AI answer engine out there that you want to show up on. An MCP server is rapidly going to become table stakes. Maybe some technology surpasses it in the longer term, but today that is the game.

Second, I would take some time and review ChatGPT’s app store guidelines. I’ll link to them in the show notes and this shouldn’t surprise you given what I’ve been talking about, but they look remarkably comparable to existing app store guidelines for Apple and for Google. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

Third, and most importantly, you’ve also got to work on making your content and experiences ones that your customers will seek out by name. I call it “your brand is the prompt.” Otherwise, you’re just moving towards a world where you’re going to have to pay ChatGPT or whatever AI tool your customers prefer for your brand and business to get seen, just like we did with search, just like we did with the internet, just like we did with, I don’t know, just about everything else that’s happened over the last 20 years.

So maybe this time we plan ahead to make sure we don’t have to pay for every customer. Maybe this time we start building a brand our customers seek out intentionally where customers ask for you by name. That’s how your cost of acquisition goes down longer term. That’s what I mean when I say “your brand is the prompt in the age of AI.” That’s why “your brand is the prompt” matters.

So to sum all of this up, I think that ChatGPT apps opening up to everyone is a Good Thing for brands and businesses that want customers to connect through ChatGPT. I think it’ll also likely push other AI engines, answer engines to do something similar. And it’s almost certainly worth doing the work and testing for your business.

But it’s not going to answer all of your prayers and guarantee that customers or guests or clients find and choose you every single time. In fact, what it does is it ups the ante on making sure your brand is the prompt. If you don’t, you’re putting yourself right back in the same position you’ve been in for years.

So maybe let’s not do that.

The time to act is now. I’m confident you can succeed at this. And I can’t wait to see how you do.

Show Wrap-Up and Credits

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. I’m willing to bet that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the episode and let them know what you think. Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, which is episode 479, as well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. And of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

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