Anthropic Economic Index now available to query through Claude

ChatGPT has quietly started hiding data about how people use it to search, and if your business depends on understanding where customers come from, that is worth paying attention to right now.

The Visibility You Had Is Starting to Disappear

If you have used ChatGPT for your business, or if customers are finding you through AI-powered search, you may have noticed something: the information about how those conversations happen is getting harder to access. OpenAI has begun limiting the data businesses can see about how users interact with ChatGPT, particularly in its business-tier accounts.

This is not a small tweak. Search Engine Journal has drawn a direct comparison to what Google did in 2011, when it stopped sharing which search terms were bringing people to your website. That decision, known in the industry as "not provided," effectively blinded businesses to a huge chunk of their own marketing data overnight. Many small business owners still do not fully understand the impact that had. ChatGPT appears to be following the same playbook.

Why This Keeps Happening (and Why It Always Hurts Small Businesses)

The pattern is consistent across every major tech platform. A tool arrives, it is open and generous with data, businesses build strategies around that data, and then the platform closes the tap. Google did it with search terms. Meta did it with organic reach. Now ChatGPT is doing it with conversation insights.

The businesses that get hurt most are not the big ones. Large companies have dedicated teams, expensive analytics contracts, and enough volume to work around the gaps. Small business owners, tradespeople, clinic managers, the people running things day to day with limited time and budget, tend to be caught flat-footed. By the time the change is widely discussed, the window to act has often already closed.

What This Means If You Use AI Tools in Your Business

There is a practical upside here too. A developer has published a free tool (linked in the source material) that lets businesses download their own ChatGPT conversation history from business accounts before that data becomes inaccessible. That is a limited window, and it costs nothing to use if you act quickly.

More broadly, this is a useful reminder that your customer data should live somewhere you control, not just inside a third-party platform. If you are using ChatGPT, or any AI-powered tool, to handle customer queries, draft content, or support your team, the conversations happening inside those tools contain genuinely useful information about what your customers are asking and what problems they are trying to solve. That insight belongs to you. Right now, for many businesses, it is sitting uncollected inside a platform that is gradually making it harder to retrieve.

Separately, Anthropic (the company behind the Claude AI assistant) has launched a new tool that lets users query its Economic Index, a dataset tracking how AI is actually being used across different industries and job types. For a small business owner, this is a useful sanity check on which parts of your sector are genuinely being changed by AI, and which are still largely unaffected. It is free to use and worth a look if you are trying to decide where to focus your time.

What To Do About It

1. 1.Export your ChatGPT business data this week. If your business has a ChatGPT Business or Team account, download your conversation history now using the free tool mentioned above, before platform changes make it harder or impossible.

1. 1.Start logging what customers ask your AI tools. Even a simple shared document works. The questions people ask your chatbot or assistant are gold for improving your website, your FAQs, and your marketing.

1. 1.Check the Anthropic Economic Index. Search for your industry and see which tasks AI is genuinely handling elsewhere. It takes ten minutes and gives you a grounded view of where the real changes are happening.

1. 1.Do not build your marketing strategy around data you do not own. If a platform is your only source of customer insight, find a way to capture that information somewhere you control, whether that is your own CRM, a spreadsheet, or your website analytics.