The next search result is a sentence.
A growing share of Gulf buyers ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overview to shortlist suppliers. Those systems do not rank pages; they cite them. Being cited has a recognisable profile, and it can be engineered. This is what I build for, alongside conventional search.
Photograph Malik Shibly · Unsplash
What is actually different about AI search
AI answers are built from a small number of sources. When a system answers "best web design company in Dubai", it retrieves a handful of pages, most often directories, review sites, forums and a few primary sources, and composes an answer from them. Being one of those sources is the whole game, and it is a different game from ranking tenth.
The sources share a profile. Across the research behind this page, cited pages tend to have original data or a clear method, a named author with a verifiable identity, structured markup (FAQ, Organisation, Person), a recent date, and presence on the platforms the systems retrieve from — including Bing, which ChatGPT uses.
Directories and communities are cited more than agency sites. Clutch, Sortlist, Reddit and YouTube appear in AI answers about Gulf agencies far more often than the agencies’ own pages. An AI-search plan therefore works on the entity across the web, not only on the website.
- Systems
- Google AI Overviews · ChatGPT · Perplexity · Copilot
- Languages
- English · Arabic
- Markets
- UAE · KSA · Qatar · Bahrain · Oman
- Also called
- GEO · AEO · LLM optimisation
How I build for AI answers
Entity across the web
Consistent listings on the directories AI systems cite, Person and Organisation schema with sameAs links, and a single positioning sentence used everywhere.
Content built to be cited
Two original-data pieces a quarter, with methodology, FAQ markup, dates and a named author.
Retrieval plumbing
Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow, pre-rendered HTML, llms.txt, and pages that answer a question in the first paragraph.
Measured citations
Tracking which prompts mention the company, on which systems, in which language — reported each quarter alongside rankings.
Growth partnership
Ongoing, quarterly
Keep the platform compounding: content, experiments, releases, and a plan that evidence rewrites.
AI visibility is a publishing and entity programme, not a one-off fix. It runs inside a growth partnership, alongside conventional search.
Questions
- Is this the same as SEO?
- It overlaps heavily. The technical foundation is shared; the difference is the emphasis on being a source — original data, authorship, entity signals — rather than on ranking a page. I run both as one plan.
- Can you guarantee we appear in ChatGPT?
- No, and nobody honest can. What can be built is the profile of pages and entities that are cited, and a measurement of whether it is working.
- Does it work in Arabic?
- AI systems answer Arabic prompts and cite Arabic sources. The same profile applies: original, authored, structured, recent. Arabic content is part of the programme.
- What is GEO, AEO and answer-engine optimisation?
- Different names for the same practice — optimising to be cited by generative systems. The names change quarterly; the profile of a cited page has been stable.