The short version
- In 62% of AI answers, the business ranked first on Google wasn't mentioned at all.
- Businesses that got named had about three times as many mentions on other websites as the ones left out.
- Review count mattered less than what the reviews said. Answers quoted specific phrases.
- The same question asked in Arabic returned a different shortlist 44% of the time.
Why we started counting
In March, a client with four dental clinics asked us a fair question: when someone asks ChatGPT for the best dentist in JLT, do we come up? We didn't know. Rank trackers don't cover AI answers in a way we trusted for Dubai, and the tools that claim to were mostly guessing.
So we built a spreadsheet. It got out of hand.
How we ran it
We wrote 200 prompts across six local categories, phrased the way people actually type them: "family dentist near Dubai Marina", "divorce lawyer in Dubai who speaks Arabic", "cheap monthly car rental Al Barsha". Each one ran in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews, logged out, from a Dubai connection. Then we ran the whole set again in Arabic.
That's 1,200 searches a month, and a little over 7,000 answers by September. For every business an answer named, we checked where it ranked on Google for the same query.
How often the Google #1 result was named in the AI answer
- Law firms46%
- Real estate41%
- Car rental38%
- Dental34%
- Gyms31%
- Restaurants28%
Even in the best category, law firms, the top Google result made it into fewer than half the answers. Restaurants were the worst. AI answers for food lean heavily on listicles and Reddit, and those rarely agree with Google's ranking.
What the named businesses shared
Other websites talked about them
This was the big one. Named businesses had been mentioned elsewhere: a Time Out Dubai list, a Gulf News story, a thread on r/dubai, a directory with an actual description. The median named business had 23 of these mentions. The median business left out had 7.
Their reviews said specific things
Answers often lifted phrases straight from Google reviews. "Gentle with kids." "Speaks Arabic and Russian." "Open late on Fridays."
A clinic with 400 reviews that all said "great service" lost to one with 90 reviews that described what actually happened.
Their websites answered the question
Named businesses usually had a page that matched the prompt almost word for word. "Emergency dentist in JLT, open until 11pm" beats a services page where emergency care is bullet number 14.
Arabic was a separate race
Ask the same question in Arabic and 44% of the time you get a different shortlist. The businesses that showed up had proper Arabic pages written by people. Translation plugins didn't help, and in a few cases the machine-translated page seemed to hurt.
What we'd do in your shoes
Start with the boring part. Make sure there's a page for each question your customers ask, in both languages, and that it answers the question in the first two lines.
Then go and get mentioned. One well-placed article in a publication people in Dubai read did more for one client than six months of directory submissions. And when you ask happy customers for reviews, ask what they liked about the visit rather than asking for five stars. You get better reviews, and AI answers have something to quote.
What we got wrong
We assumed schema markup would matter a lot. On its own, it didn't. Pages with perfect schema and no outside mentions still got ignored. We also expected Perplexity to behave like Google. It cites far more small sites, which is good news if you're new.
Six months isn't long, and these engines change every few weeks. We're keeping the tracker running and will publish the next round in April. If you want your category included, email rania@adascend.io.
- AI search
- AEO
- Local SEO
- Original research
Rania Haddad
Rania leads AI search at AdAscend. Before that she spent six years running SEO for a regional property portal. She reads Arabic search results for fun, which we've stopped questioning.
