What is the UAE AI Visibility Study?

It is original research by Dubai Prod that measures which brands ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Claude actually name when UAE buyers ask category questions such as "best marketing agency in Dubai." A fixed set of 28 questions is run in fresh sessions each wave, and the brands named and domains cited are recorded rather than estimated.

How is AI visibility measured?

By querying a fixed question set across five answer engines in logged-out or fresh sessions, then recording two things per question: which brands are named and which domains are cited. The headline metric is answer share of voice — the share of questions where a brand is named. The study repeats monthly so direction over time, not a single snapshot, is the finding.

Why does AI cite directories more than brand websites?

Answer engines lean on independently corroborated sources. Review platforms and directories aggregate many signals about a brand, so they are treated as trustworthy references. That is why getting listed and reviewed on third-party platforms often moves AI visibility more than on-site changes alone.

Can you actually rank in ChatGPT?

No. ChatGPT has no ranking system, no results page and no position one. When a question needs current information, ChatGPT runs a search, retrieves a small number of passages from pages it can access, and writes an answer grounded in them. Visibility means being retrieved and cited, not ranked. The practical work is making your content easy to retrieve and quote, and making your brand consistently described enough across the web that the model is confident naming it.

Which crawlers does OpenAI use, and which should I allow?

OpenAI operates three main user agents. OAI-SearchBot builds the index ChatGPT search draws on — blocking it removes you from ChatGPT search entirely. ChatGPT-User fetches a page when a user or tool triggers a visit. GPTBot collects data used for model training. Allow OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User if you want to appear in ChatGPT. Whether to allow GPTBot is a legitimate business decision, since it concerns training rather than retrieval.

How long does it take to appear in ChatGPT answers?

Technical fixes such as opening crawler access and restructuring content into extractable answer blocks are usually reflected within four to eight weeks, because retrieval indexes refresh far faster than model training. Being named confidently takes longer — typically two to four months — because that depends on third-party corroboration, which has to be earned through coverage, reviews and directory presence rather than published on your own site.

Does an llms.txt file make ChatGPT cite me?

Not on its own. llms.txt is a proposed standard that provides a structured summary of your site for language models, and it is cheap and sensible to publish. But it is not a ranking mechanism and no major assistant guarantees it is read. Treat it as one small piece of retrieval readiness alongside crawler access, clean semantic HTML, structured data and extractable content — not as a shortcut.

Why does ChatGPT describe my business incorrectly?

Almost always because your own sources disagree. If your website, llms.txt, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and directory listings state different addresses, founding years or service lists, the model has no reliable signal and will either hedge or pick one at random. Fixing this means consolidating your entity: one name, one address, one founding year, one service list, and a sameAs array in your Organization schema linking every official profile.

Is ChatGPT optimisation different from SEO?

They overlap in infrastructure but differ in target. SEO optimises a page to rank on a results list and is measured in clicks. ChatGPT optimisation makes a passage easy to retrieve and a brand safe to name, and is measured in citations and answer share. Classic SEO still matters, because crawlable, fast, authoritative pages are what retrieval draws from — but ranking well and being cited are no longer the same outcome.

UAE AI Visibility Study 2026

Name: UAE AI Visibility Study
Creator: Dubai Prod
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

When a buyer in Dubai asks an AI which agency to use, a name comes back — or yours does not. This study measures which names come back, across the five answer engines UAE buyers actually use, for the questions they actually ask.

Every value we publish is observed, not estimated. A study whose method is public and whose raw log can be inspected survives being challenged; an impressive statistic with no traceable origin does not. So the method comes first, and the numbers come only from running it.

What this is

A repeatable measurement of answer share of voice — the share of buyer questions where a brand is named — plus the sources the engines cite, run monthly so the finding is direction over time, not a single snapshot.

What we measure

Metric	What it tells you
Answer share of voice	The share of questions where a brand is named — per engine and overall. The headline number.
Most-cited sources	Which domains the engines draw on — usually directories and review platforms, telling you where corroboration work should go.
Unclaimed questions	Questions where no brand is named at all — open ground, and the fastest wins available.

Method

Fixed question set. ~28 questions phrased the way UAE buyers ask them — category ("best marketing agency in Dubai"), cost, and process questions. The set stays stable between waves; new questions are appended and tagged, never substituted.

Fixed engines. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Claude — each queried with search enabled, in a logged-out or fresh session so personalisation does not contaminate the result.

Record two things per question: which brands are named, and which domains are cited. Nothing is inferred.

Repeat monthly. Direction over time is the finding. A single wave is a snapshot and is reported as one.

Wave 1 results

Wave 1 · ChatGPT (web-enabled search) · 28 questions · 22 August 2026.

A single web-enabled ChatGPT session — a first snapshot, not a full multi-engine wave. Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Claude follow in the next waves. Every figure below is observed, not estimated.

8 / 10

"best agency" questions where Clutch.co was a cited source — more than any agency's own site

17 / 28

questions returned no agency by name — open ground for brands that optimise now

35+

different agencies named across 10 category questions, with little overlap — no settled AI consensus

Most-cited sources

Source	Cited in	Type
clutch.co	9 of 28 questions	Directory / reviews
goodfirms.co · themanifest.com	category questions	Directory / reviews
wikipedia.org · arxiv.org	definition / "how-to" questions	Reference

The takeaway is consistent: ChatGPT's Dubai-agency recommendations are assembled from independently corroborated directories, not from the agencies' own websites — which is where GEO work should focus.

What the results will mean for UAE brands

The pattern this method reliably surfaces is that answer engines cite independently corroborated sources — directories, review platforms and editorial listicles — more often than brand websites. On-page GEO makes a brand eligible to be cited; being described consistently across third-party sources is what gets it named.

So the study is not vanity. Each wave points directly at the next move: the sources being cited are where a brand should earn a presence, and the unclaimed questions are where it can become the first answer.

Want to know if AI names your brand?

We run this study for individual brands as part of our GEO service — your share of voice, the sources you are missing from, and the questions you could own.

Get your AI visibility report

The UAE AI Visibility Study

What we measure

Method

Wave 1 results

Most-cited sources

What the results will mean for UAE brands