AEO in the Middle East
AI search is now the front door to discovery in the Gulf. In 2025, buyers in the UAE and Saudi Arabia are turning to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity for recommendations, comparisons, and buying advice instead of scrolling through Google.
That shift creates a new visibility challenge for brands: AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation). The rules are different from SEO. The winners look different too. And the Middle East is moving on this faster than almost anywhere else.
This piece walks through three structural reasons the Gulf is in a stronger position than most markets, why Arabic-language AEO is the biggest open opportunity in regional marketing, and the practical steps brands should be taking in the next 90 days.
Understanding AEO in the Gulf in 2025
Search today is less about typing keywords into Google and more about asking a question and getting one answer. Tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity have changed how people find information. Instead of browsing ten blue links, users get a single synthesised answer, often by brand name.
That shift is more advanced in the Gulf than almost anywhere else. By mid 2025, ChatGPT held 91% of AI tool market share in Saudi Arabia and 89% in the UAE, according to Statcounter. Deloitte's 2025 Digital Consumer Trends survey found 58% of consumers across both markets already use generative AI, ahead of the UK and most of Europe.
The same question asked in English and Arabic can return a different list of brands from the same model. The brands cited inside those answers are starting to become the brands buyers consider first. If yours doesn't appear, you aren't in the running.
The Gulf already runs on ChatGPT
Adoption in the region isn't a trend. It's already settled. In Saudi Arabia, 83% of generative AI users engage at least weekly and 45% use AI tools every single day. That sort of behaviour shift normally takes a decade. In the Gulf it's already done.
Government is doing the heavy lifting on infrastructure. The UAE became one of the first countries on the planet where OpenAI granted nationwide access to ChatGPT Plus, through a direct government partnership. Saudi Arabia put $40 billion of its $100 billion Project Transcendence initiative directly into AI infrastructure.
ChatGPT now sits between most Gulf buyers and most categories. If your brand isn't named in those answers, it isn't in the consideration set.
What ChatGPT now sits between:
Buyers and the categories they're researching
Brand awareness and consideration decisions
Traditional digital channels and final purchase intent
Optimise for:
Appearing in country and city specific buyer queries ("best X in UAE", "top Y in Riyadh")
Mention frequency across credible regional sources
Visibility in both English and Arabic search environments
What to do now:
Run a free visibility review on Gumshoe. It checks buyer-intent searches in your category in both English and Arabic, tracks which brands ChatGPT names, and shows you where the gaps are.
AI indexes Arabic differently than English
Ask ChatGPT a buyer-intent question in English and you get one answer. Ask the same question in Arabic and you can get a different list of brands. Often the Arabic answer is also weaker, vaguer, or just thinner.
The data backs this up. GPT-4 scores around 72% on the Arabic version of the MMLU benchmark compared to roughly 83% on the English one. Academic studies on Arabic NLP tasks have repeatedly found smaller Arabic-tuned models outperforming GPT-class models on language-specific work.
This isn't a glitch. It's the shape of how these systems are built. Training data is overwhelmingly English (around 45% of web content, versus a low single-digit share for Arabic). The teams building and improving the models work in English. Arabic itself is structurally harder, with complex morphology, right-to-left script that disrupts most English-trained tokenizers, and significant dialect variance. And the Arabic web is smaller, with less depth in the structured product reviews, trade publications, and credible citation sources LLMs lean on for authority.
The model ends up knowing English fluently and Arabic in outline. If your AEO work is English only, half your buyers can't see you.
What Arabic AEO needs:
Native Arabic writers who understand dialect and idiom
Separate keyword and question research in Arabic
Arabic-language press coverage, not translated English releases
Schema markup and FAQ formatting on Arabic pages, not just English ones
Optimise for:
Parity across English and Arabic visibility
Arabic-specific structured data
Citations from regional Arabic-language publications
What to do now:
Stop treating Arabic as a translation problem. Build a parallel Arabic AEO programme with native writers, separate research, and direct Arabic-language press outreach. The brands that close the Arabic gap first become the defaults the models reach for.
The brands winning aren't the ones winning in Google
This is the one almost nobody says out loud, and it's probably the most important.
Search engines and answer engines have different reward functions. They produce different winners. Google ranks pages. It rewards SEO discipline, paid search, content volume, and freshness. The brands that dominate Google are usually the ones with the biggest digital teams and the biggest budgets.
LLMs don't rank. They cite. The signals they care about are different: how often a brand appears across credible third-party sources, how structured and consistent its information is, whether it appears in the reference corpora the model was trained on, whether it sounds, to the model, like something other authorities already trust.
That inverts the power dynamic. A brand spending tens of millions on Google Ads doesn't necessarily get cited by ChatGPT. A challenger with strong PR coverage, a credible Wikipedia entry, and consistent mentions in industry sources can quietly outrank a category incumbent inside an LLM answer. A free Gumshoe scan will surface this in any Gulf category in under an hour.
What LLMs reward:
Repeated entity mentions across diverse trusted sources
Structured data (schema.org, JSON-LD) for citation
Presence inside reference corpora and category vocabulary
Semantic authority, not paid reach
Optimise for:
Mentions in regional industry press (Campaign ME, Arabian Business, Wamda, Gulf News, Khaleej Times)
A properly sourced Wikipedia entry that exists and stays current
Sponsored or contributed research from regional analysts
Inclusion in "best of" category listicles
What to do now:
Audit your citation footprint. Count where your brand appears in credible third-party sources, not where it ranks on Google. If a brand's strategy is "we win in Google so we'll win in ChatGPT," it's the wrong playbook for the wrong engine.
The Arabic gap is the advantage
Most brands look at the Arabic situation and see a deficit. That's the wrong way to look at it.
LLMs aren't finished products. They're hungry. They're particularly hungry for structured, credible, citable Arabic content about categories they don't know well. Every brand in the Gulf is sitting on knowledge the models genuinely need.
The brands that publish that material in Arabic, structure it with schema, and earn citations for it from regional press become the defaults the models reach for. And the work doesn't only pay off in AI answers. It pays off in regular search too. Better content structure, cleaner authority signals, more credible mentions, all of it compounds. You don't have to choose between AEO and SEO. The same investments improve both.
What the opportunity looks like:
Most Gulf categories have no clear winner in AI search yet
LLMs train continuously; early movers get baked in
The Arabic content gap is wider than English, so the wins are bigger
AEO investment also lifts SEO performance, doubling the return
Optimise for:
Asymmetric upside: small Arabic AEO investment returns outsized share-of-voice
Compounding gains across AEO and SEO at the same time
First-mover positioning inside categories before competitors notice
What to do now (90-day plan):
Find out what ChatGPT actually says about your brand. Run a free Gumshoe visibility review in both English and Arabic. Where you're invisible is where the wins are.
Stop treating Arabic as a translation job. Native writers, separate keyword research, Arabic-language press, schema on Arabic pages.
Write for citation, not just ranking. Add FAQ and HowTo schema. Lead with answers, then explain. Build comparison tables. Cite credible third-party sources.
Get cited by other people. Pitch Campaign ME, Arabian Business, Wamda, Gulf News, Khaleej Times. Get into category "best of" listicles. Maintain your Wikipedia entry. Sponsor regional research.
Move now. Most categories still have no clear winner. That won't last.
FAQs
What is AEO and how does it differ from SEO?
AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) focuses on getting cited inside answers generated by AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. SEO focuses on ranking pages in traditional search engines like Google. AEO rewards mentions, structured data, and third-party citations more than backlinks and keyword density.
Why is the Middle East different from other AEO markets?
ChatGPT holds 89 to 91% market share of AI tools in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, higher than almost any other market in the world. Consumer adoption is well ahead of brand readiness, which creates an unusual window for early movers. The Arabic-language gap also creates a regional advantage that doesn't exist in most other markets.
How do I know if my brand is invisible in ChatGPT?
Run a free visibility review on Gumshoe. It checks buyer-intent searches in your category in both English and Arabic and shows you which brands ChatGPT names. Where you're invisible is where the wins are.
Why does ChatGPT give different answers in Arabic and English?
LLMs are trained on far more English content than Arabic, which makes the English model effectively stronger. Arabic also has linguistic complexity (morphology, dialects, right-to-left script) that English-trained models handle less well. And the Arabic web is smaller, with less depth in the credible source material LLMs lean on.
What's the first thing a UAE or Saudi brand should do?
Run the free visibility audit on Gumshoe in both languages. Don't make any other investment until you know where you actually stand.
How long does it take to see results from AEO?
Some changes (schema markup, content restructuring, fresh citations) can shift LLM behaviour within weeks. Earned mentions and reference-corpus presence compound over months. The brands moving in the next 90 days are the ones that become the defaults before competitors catch up.
Final Takeaway: From Search to Selection in the Gulf
AEO in the Middle East is a four-phase maturity curve:
Audit your visibility in ChatGPT in both English and Arabic so you know where you actually stand.
Close the Arabic gap with native content, regional press, and Arabic schema, ahead of competitors who are still translating.
Earn citations from credible third-party sources so the model sees you operating inside its trusted network.
Stay first by treating AEO as a continuous discipline, not a one-off project, while categories are still settling.
Brands that follow this sequence won't just remain visible. They'll become the answer.
Ready for the next step? Run a free visibility review on Gumshoe to see exactly where your brand stands across the UAE and Saudi Arabia, in English and Arabic. The gaps are the wins waiting.
Stay visible. Be the answer. In Arabic and in English.
