AI search visibility for B2B brands in the GCC: GEO in English and Arabic

Microsoft reported that 64.0% of the UAE's working age population was using AI at the end of 2025. Forrester's 2026 research found that 94% of business buyers use AI during their buying process, and Gartner reported in March 2026 that 45% of B2B buyers used AI during a recent purchase.

Search itself has changed in the region. Google's MENA team announced AI Overviews for the Middle East and North Africa, and in Arabic globally, on May 20, 2025, and Arab News reported in October 2025 that Google rolled out AI Mode to 36 new languages including Modern Standard Arabic. A buyer in Riyadh or Dubai researching your category now often reads an AI summary before any vendor page.

Regional buyers ask regional questions. Generic GEO programs that test only global category prompts miss them. We build a prompt set around four themes and run it in English, and in Arabic where your buyers search in Arabic. Our page on GEO in the UAE shows how this applies to UAE buyers.

The answers often differ between English and Arabic, and between assistants. Record each one: which vendors are named, which sources are cited and whether the facts about you are correct.

Most visibility problems we find are fact problems. The assistant says you have no presence in Saudi Arabia because your site only mentions Dubai, or it lists an old partner, or it describes a product you retired. Fixing these is faster than creating new content.

1. Write one plain page, or section, per country you serve: entity, address if you have one, team, partners and the sectors you serve there.
2. State regional headquarters status, data hosting regions and certifications in text, not only in images or PDFs.
3. Align your LinkedIn company page, partner listings, marketplace profiles and directory profiles with the same facts.
4. Publish references and case material you are allowed to name, with country and sector.
5. Add structured data for your organization and locations, and keep it consistent with the visible text.

Many enterprise buyers in the Gulf research in English, and English content is usually where to start. Arabic pages help when buyers, especially in government-related entities, search and ask in Arabic. We plan bilingual GEO programs: we design the structure, prompts and measurement, and your Arabic-speaking team or a native partner writes or reviews the Arabic content. Machine-translated pages that read badly can harm trust more than they help visibility.

Be precise about presence. We are a Canadian agency based in Montreal, and on our own site we say we work with clients across the GCC rather than implying an office we do not have. The same rule protects your brand: if your site suggests a Riyadh office that does not exist, an assistant may repeat it to a procurement team that will check.

Assistants lean on sources beyond your site: news coverage, partner pages, event speaker lists, directories, review sites and analyst mentions. For GCC visibility, regional business media, event pages for GITEX and LEAP, and your partners' customer pages are often among the cited sources.

We map which domains are cited for your prompt set, then prioritize the ones where a correct, current mention is realistic: partner pages, speaker profiles, association listings and earned coverage. Our AI shortlist authority work covers that program.

Measure monthly, with the same prompts, in both languages.

• Share of answer: the share of prompts where you are named, by theme and language.
• Accuracy: the share of answers that describe your presence, products and partners correctly.
• Cited sources: which pages and domains assistants use, and whether yours are among them.
• AI referrals: visits from assistants in analytics, by landing page and, where possible, by account.
• Pipeline: meetings and opportunities where the buyer mentions AI research in a self-reported source field.

Our guide to measuring share of answer in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews explains the method in detail.

Most of these are easy to fix once someone looks for them.

• Testing only global English prompts and assuming the regional answers are the same.
• Describing the region as "MENA" or "Middle East" everywhere, so assistants cannot tell which countries you actually serve.
• Keeping regional headquarters, data hosting and certification details only in PDFs or images that assistants rarely read.
• Publishing machine-translated Arabic pages that contradict the English ones.
• Claiming offices or teams that do not exist, which assistants then repeat to buyers who will check.
• Measuring traffic from assistants but never asking buyers whether AI research shaped their shortlist.

We work with clients across the GCC from Montreal. A first GEO project usually takes four to six weeks: a prompt set in English and Arabic, a baseline across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, a list of fact fixes, and a source plan.

Our generative engine optimization service explains the full program.

For the Kingdom, our page on GEO in Saudi Arabia covers the regional prompts.

To see how assistants describe you today, talk to our team.